“We move between two darknesses.”

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

We have to choose between dialogue and utter devastation.

There is the great, silent, continuous struggle: the struggle between the State and the Individual; between the State which demands and the individual who attempts to evade such demands. Because the individual, left to himself, unless he be a saint or hero, always refuses to pay taxes, obey laws, or go to war.

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

My definition of slavery is the deprivation of human volition, any form of relationship between two peoples which is based on the deprivation of volition of one side.

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises. It’s either Us or Them!