The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.

The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.

In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.