Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.