The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.

The east is not for me--the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.

With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.

My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconsciou s is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos.