I dislike poetry because it is an artificial medium, limited to literature, hence dull.
A fool loves to teach but a clever man loves to learn.
Civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.
Folk culture is distinguished by a lack of outstanding individuals.
Read over your compositions and where you meet with a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Theological arguments are the masterpieces of the human imagination.
Distrust a philosophy that makes use of italics.
Jascha Heifetz: "I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing anymore. And second, to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."
In a rich area plants and animals fight each other for survival; in the desert they battle the elements alone. This perhaps contributes to the peacefulness of the desert. The industrial revolution can be defined as the sum of the processes by means of which the human race began to live in the jungle rather than the desert.
No man in a desert or on a mountain ever thought of himself as the product of social forces—no man in such a position ever doubted that he himself was a primary particle, an ultimate reality.
It was nature which loved the race and it was man who added to that a love of the individual.
Evangelism is an ugly process of smugly berating.
The U.S. has more students than farmers.
Archeology is the science of rubbish.
The difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism: one censors newspapers and the other writes them.
Dictatorship is tyranny by an individual or by a group; totalitarianism is tyranny by a system.
The less developed, the more bureaucratic?
Institutions are the tradition militant.
Happiness, for the most part, is the wish to be what you are.
Copying from one author is plagiarism; copying from many is research.
The value of a life is in direct relation to dread of death.
The stars cannot be animate because they have nothing to eat.
History is philosophy taught by examples.
In detail. history concerns anything: in general, however, it deals with killing.
Over-educated persons enjoy jazz.
The analytical mind is never fully at rest.
True richness is being happy without needs.
Ironic that the dullest and least educated persons have the most free time to think in as they wish.
A people's dignity and freedom lie in their legal system.
I prefer books about life to those about life and death.
The best novels deal with an average person's most interesting moments.
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.
A culture, not a people, deserve whatever government it has.
One writes objectively by using objective words.
It is at the extremes of human nature which they knew so well how to explore, where horror and delight, love and hate, cruelty and tenderness are indistinguishable, that the Romantics sought a heightened, transformed, superhuman existence which might abolish life as it is actually lived; nationalism is the political expression of this quest.
Communists are the true reactionaries because they insist on fighting the battles of the prior century.
Population migrations require no moralizing.
To be well-educated one must be skilled in either mathematics or languages.
A civilization is its institutions.
Impatience can ruin a trip as badly as a lack of fresh water.
Political romanticism is the essential evil force in modern history.
Life's great misfortunes occur when dressed.
Can mystics laugh? Can a humorous person be mystical?
The Middle East
Muslims may be equals in the face of God, but rarely in the face of other Muslims.
The ultimate irony and put-down of the Middle East situation is that the Arab challenge has been the greatest single factor working in favor of Israel's existence.
Muhammad's failure to appoint a successor has denied Muslim political stability till the present.
Egypt cannot be exotic—it is far too blatant.
All foreigners in Egypt feel superior to the Egyptians,
Middle East bazaars still function as if the world had not caught up with them, the only difference being that now they seem to sell the worst goods instead of the best.
