"The quest for philosophy's beginning is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty, and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels."

"He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you."

". . .the real world is much smaller than the imaginary."

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

"Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter."

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."

"A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project."

"We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died."

"An honest election, under democracy, is an act of innocence which does not take place more than once in the history of a given nation."

"An army marches on its stomach."