“Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.”

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

Art is science in the flesh.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

It is the poor man who’ll ever count his flock.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

Be the one she can count on, and the one who never fails to make her smile.

Stop counting the reasons why they should be loved and start counting the many reasons why you are the one who is worth loving.

Wherever you are my love, know that we can still see the same moonlight whilst counting the same stars.

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That’s all any of us have.