“Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....”

“The Three Wiseman:The weather has been awful,The countryside is dreary,Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock,Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help alongYours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,and miss our wives, our books, our dogs,but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.To discover how to be human nowIs the reason we follow this star.”

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long,Too careful even in our selfish loves:The decorative manias we obeyDie in grimaces round us every day,Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voiceWhich utters an absurd command - Rejoice. ”

“In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried.”

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.”

“Beauty, midnight, vision dies:Let the winds of dawn that blowSoftly round your dreaming headSuch a day of welcome showEye and knocking heart may bless,Find our mortal world enough;Noons of dryness find you fedBy the involuntary powers,Nights of insult let you passWatched by every human love.”

“The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”