“The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

What passion cannot music raise and quell!

The guidelines say all the right things, … They address all the issues that were raised as problems at the Air Force Academy.

The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.

I direct, and I make movies I can’t finance. I can’t raise money. I can’t sell anything. I make things.

I was raised a Catholic and when you’re raised a Catholic they don’t teach you to think for yourself. You’re taught not to think too deeply about things.

Although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.

We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.