The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices, there are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. It seeks to show new perspectives and other choices. It is a way to help expand and liberate the consciousness; our experiences, understandings, imaginings, options and thereby our lives.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Life is too short to learn German

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.