It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.
We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.
Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.
When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you'll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you'll eat yourself.
Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust. You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will. Each hour is precious.
Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.