You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.