Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.
Max Lerner

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.
Max Lerner

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
Max Lerner

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
Max Lerner

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.
Max Lerner

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
Max Lerner

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
Max Lerner