“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”

“...and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art.”

“Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.”

“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”

“For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief.”

“It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it.”

“…inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only as a function of our sublime self.”