That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

At times I think and at times I am.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Love is being stupid together.

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.