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

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

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.

Like all bullies, they’re cowards underneath the swagger.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.

If I’m scared and I’m a coward, why do you guys want to see me fight?

When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated, sitting in my own crap and urine – this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward.

To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity.

The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.

The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and converts it into fire.