It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.