History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.
If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term “masterpiece” to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.
The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.
Though man’s feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.
A large share of our art heritage is now derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even from peoples to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.
Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.
As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.
The twenty-first century will be spiritual or it will not be.
He who has dreamed for long resembles his dream.
A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life’s problems without asking its question.
Nothing is harder than to get people to think about what they are going to do.
The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.
One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be.
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
The next century’s task will be to rediscover its gods.
Communism destroys democracy. Democracy can also destroy Communism.
In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.
I don’t argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.
The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.
Between eigtheen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing.