There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
Now is the age of anxiety.
Hunger allows no choice.
In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one’s living so as not to be a parasite and loving one’s neighbor.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
To choose what is difficult all one’s days, as if it were easy, that is faith.