“The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.”
“Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.”
“The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.”
“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.”
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”
“Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”
“The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.”
“One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”
“Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.”
“Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.”
“Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.”
“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.”
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
“Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”
“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.”
“The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.”
“The man who is forever disturbed about the problems of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.”
“It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.”
“We do not talk -- we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.”
“Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.”
“The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.”
“Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.”
“The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.”
“If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
“In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.”
“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”
“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”
“Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.”
“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
“The word ''civilization'' to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.”