If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...

. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.

You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.

I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.

Success isn't measured by money or power or social rank. Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace.

Getting rid of the dictator is only a first step in establishing a free society. The dictatorship must also be disassembled.

In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.

This is the real unwritten rule: You don't want what you know you shouldn't. And I haven't just broken that rule. I have wrecked it, smashed it, and still... And still I want.

You need the willingness to fail all the time.

Our lives are entwined with the people over the footlights. We are a part of them.

‎"Someday I'm going to marry someone like my mom and I'll be smiling all the time the way my Mom and Dad are.

Lasting solutions to many social problems will be found only as we each learn to say, 'I am society'.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.