Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

The cheese and wine party has the form of friendship without the warmth and devotion. It is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en mass, or for making overtures towards more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.