“Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

“It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.”

“The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line:...”

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

“The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.”

“When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”