What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
People are like lice – they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused.
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
We create our fate everyday.
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals.
Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.
In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
We live at the edge of the miraculous.
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets – we remember only.
For the moment I can think of nothing – except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.