Reflections on the Human Condition

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music.

We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.

It has been said that all places are equidistant from heaven, and all eras equidistant from eternity.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

A creative organizer creates an organization that can function well without him. When a genuine leader has done his work, his followers will say, “We have done it ourselves,” and feel that they can do great things without great leaders. With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do they arrange things so that they themselves

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

The spectacular expansion of the adolescent group combined with a failure of nerve in the adult population has profoundly changed the nature of our society.