“Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.”

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.

You have to learn to do everything, even to die.

Art isn’t everything. It’s just about everything.

Art is the pulse of a nation.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

I wish that I was where I am.

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.

Harebrained schemes often lead to great discoveries.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I’d learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only “like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth.”