The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.
Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure.
Unless our souls had root in soil divine We could not bear earth's overwhelming strife. The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine, Convinces me of everlasting life.
Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.
for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.
In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.
For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless.
Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
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