Ravelstein

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?

Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.

It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.

Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.

But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person.

Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain

It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think — to say it in your own words, without compromise.

Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear, or see.

Those jerks playing chevalier à votre service? Of course it’s just a game. But the women get a kick

One reason why violence is so popular may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons,

American nihilism was nihilism without the abyss.

I was never more out of line than when we stood together in the judge’s chambers to be married.

He said that Ivan Ilyich had made a marriage de convenance, and that if he and his wife had loved each other things would have looked different.

And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction.

On the telephone she chirped like Papagena.

The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth. Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them.

Either she had in mind men she had liked in the past, or she had some male principle of her own to follow, a Jungian masculine counterpart, her particular animus or inborn vision of a man—unconscious, of course.

For that matter, why did Molly marry Leopold Bloom? Her answer was “Well as well him as another.

Nothing like a French word to neutralize an American danger.

The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment—a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress. I mention bohemianism because we need to feel that we are liberated.

And then the husband is pushed onstage in a wheelchair by the wife. He looks very weak. Muffled in blankets like an invalid. The wife is blooming. She is dressed for tennis and has the racket under her arm. She fusses over him, tucks him in, kisses him. His eyes are closed. He looks like death. She says, ‘Rest, darling, I’ll be back after my set—real real soon.

You’re even a faithful husband. You served day after day after day with no time off for good behavior or applying for parole.

I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.

People can’t be expected to live without love or the simulacrum of love. A nice friendly sexual connection is what most have to settle for.

People go to the trouble of organizing a view of themselves and the view gives them the consistency or the appearance of consistency society seems to require.