All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.

A resolution that is communicated is no longer within thy power; thy attentions become now the plaything of chance; he who would have his commands certainly carried out must take man by surprise.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

Of the truly creative no one is ever master; it must be left to go its own way.

Fortunately, we can take in only so much misfortune; what exceeds that limit either destroys us or leaves us indifferent.

Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of Life.

I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.