Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter.

Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it.

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself.

The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.