“Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”

“Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.”

“Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.”

“…the violin — that most human of all instruments…”

“Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.”

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.”