Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it.
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.
An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan – that is the rule.
How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?
There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.
Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
Death is the room that is always empty.