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“The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody" is not "everybody." "Everybody" was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, "everybody" is the mass alone.”

“How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility.”

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.”

“It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”

“I know that many people won’t believe that a child not yet eleven is capable of such feelings. It is not to those people that I am telling my story. I’m telling it to those who have greater knowledge of humanity. An adult who has learned how to transform part of his emotions into thought processes notices that such thoughts aren’t present in a child, and then concludes that the experiences aren’t present, either. But only seldom in my life have I had such deep and painful experiences as I had then.”