The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

In art, we are the first heirs of all the earth. . . . Accidents impair and Time transforms, but it is we who choose.

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

A break in the established order is never the work of chance. It is the outcome of a man's resolve to turn life to account.

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.

The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be.