Children are the keys of paradise.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
Language was invented to ask questions.
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.
The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.
It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations – past and present – are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.