Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

When you understand who you are, you cause the world to change in your favor.

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

You have it on your noise, but you still need a glass to see it... We need others to admit our faults.

Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.

two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes

In order to have a real life of any romance, there has to be a level of fantasy.

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

Modern American magic, late 20th century magic, is tremendously disrespectful of the audience.

I find sadness and strife to be so much more interesting with an upbeat melody.