I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.
It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empires.
All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
All one’s work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn’t mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion.
We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That’s what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages – hate them to the death.
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.
A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.
I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.
One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.
Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.
It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.