“Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”

People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Everything is politics.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

If life isn’t about human beings and living in harmony, then I don’t know what it’s about.

I agree that faith is essential to success in life, but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death.

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.

I won’t admit or deny anything, makes me more interesting.

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used – we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.