Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them.
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique – without which however it cannot exist at all.
German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.
One can repent even of having repented.
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.
The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.
Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
International affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no way of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers.
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
Enemies could become the best companions. Companionship is based on a common interest, and the greater the interest the closer the companionship. What makes enemies of people, if not the eagerness, the passion for the same thing?