Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
My God, these folks don’t know how to love – that’s why they love so easily.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.
How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
It’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money, but if you’re born lucky, you will always have more money.
A woman needn’t be dragged down by her functions.
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one’s whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.
I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of a disaster.
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.
Nothing is as bad as a marriage that’s a hopeless failure.
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
Men and women aren’t really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.