When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.

When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349

Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.