“He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

“Anytime a son-in-law does something wrong, he can easily become a son-out-law.”

“This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.”

“A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”

“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. This is how I begin and then it becomes something else.”

“What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.”

“Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something he does not have.”

“Anybody who thinks he is something great, even before God, is rightly abandoned by God, as one who thinks that he does not need His help.”

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”

“Seduction is merely encouraging a man to do something he already wants to do.”