We can only learn to love by loving.
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth – well, it’s like brown – it’s not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don’t know much about goodness.