We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.
It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.
Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.
One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape.
People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.
Heavy, heavy-hearted people grow lighter and rise occasionally to their surface through precisely that which makes others heavier,through hatred and love.