People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.