The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Use, do not abuse... neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.
A rich man cannot enjoy a sound mind nor a sound body without exercise and abstinence; and yet these are truly the worst ingredients of poverty.
If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.
An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.
Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.
Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
