All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.
When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.
The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action.
Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.
Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.
Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.
The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.
There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.
There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people – we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.
The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.