The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
Some men have a necessity to be mean as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
