“Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”
“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”
“Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.”
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
“A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.”
“Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.”
“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”
“Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.”
“That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.”
“If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh.”
“Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”
“Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.”