“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.”
“Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!”
“What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.”
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
“And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?”
“Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”
“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.”
“Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.”
“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.”
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
“The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.”
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets -- we remember only.”
“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”
“Instead of asking -- ''How much damage will the work in question bring about?'' why not ask -- ''How much good? How much joy?''”
“The man who is forever disturbed about the condition 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.”
“The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.”
“Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines --these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.”
“Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.”
“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.”
“Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.”
“When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.”
“I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.”
“When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.”
“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.”
“It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.”