“Intoxicating joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, the world once seemed to me.”

“Every torment they had experienced was returned to them an intoxication. It seemed to them that the griefs , the sleeplessness, the tears, the anguish, the dismay, the despair, became caresses and radiance...and that their sorrows were so many servants preparing their joy. To have suffered, how good it is! Their grief made a halo around their happiness.”

“The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.”

“Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you- colored vapors did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself,- and so he created the world.”

“I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things”

“But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.”