One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

A good book is an education of the heart.

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.