A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.
No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance.
Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.
Rest forever, tired heart. The final illusion has perished. The one we believed eternal is gone. Just like that. Out the door desire follows hope. Rest forever. Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention nor is the earth worth a sigh. Bitterness and boredom is life, nothing else ever, and the world is mud. Quiet now. Despair for the last time. Fate gives us dying as a gift. Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power which rules for the common evil and the infinite vanity of it all.
That is why all great men are modest: they consistently measure themselves not in comparison to other people but to the idea of perfection ever present in their minds, an ideal infinitely clearer and greater than any common people have, and they also realize how far they are from fulfilling their ideal.
Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
He listened to her with silent attention, and on her ceasing to speak, rose directly from his seat, and after saying in a voice of emotion, 'To your sister I wish all imaginable happiness; to Willoughby, that he may endeavor to deserve her,' took leave, and went away.
When we disrespect a person, we disrespect God
I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.