You see, nothing matters except pleasure – which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
Underneath an artist’s preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.
Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
… history – the lamp which illumines national character…
And I saw her as a sad thirtieth child of Valentine that fell, not as Lucifer rebelling against God, but because she too passionately wanted to be united with him! All things in excess become sin.
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential – the imagination.
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
I have done so many things in my life,” she said to the mirror. “Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully…was I wrong?
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time… love lavished on absolute fools. Love’s a charity ward, you know.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.