It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

The mind is "ashamed" of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence palefaces.