The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.
Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
Christianity has the rancor of the sick at its very core-the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is well-constructed, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offense to its ears and eyes.
Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities.