“Human beings are mountains of unconscious being, walking the old grooves of instinct and simple life, with a kind of occasional phosphorescence of consciousness at the summit. And this conscious phosphorescence derives its value and its power from the emotions, from the instincts; only its form is derived from the intellectual shapes of thought. Age [...]
“Thought is immobilised - or rather races like a machine with nothing to bite on - once it is declutched from action, for thought is an aid to action. Thought guides action, but it learns how to guide from action. Being must historically and always proceed knowing, for knowing evolves as an extension of being.”
“What is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter.”
“She did not waste time asking herself where such a thought had come from, she was only surprised at its slowness, at how the first word had been so slow in appearing, the slowness of those to follow, and how she found that the thought was already there before, somewhere or other, and only the [...]
“You see, Dr. Stadler, people don’t want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. [...] So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking.”
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.”
“We are generally not interested in a theory if it has no capacity to resemble anything we encounter in the world around us.”