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

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…I don’t know which makes me feel worse.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

If Abu Bakr is dead and Umar is Caliph, then we hear and obey.

To heal is to be constantly reminded that once you learn to punch, you die with blood on your wrist.

You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.