The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved

To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish.

Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.

Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it-whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night.