For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.