“I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.”

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry.

A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Religion I have defined as “Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art”.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,’

Literature is news that stays news.

The temple is holy because it is not for sale.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron, I should have been able to do better.

All one can really leave one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right, An emptiness above– Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all your years.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

The handsome gifts that fate and nature lend us Most often are the very ones that end us.

One cannot scold or complain at every word. Learn to endure patiently, or else, as I live and breathe, you shall learn it whether you want or not.

Seeing your face so high in fragments on the sky, your voice in the wind, just one day I’d like to be in your arms once again.

Strictly speaking, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage because you cannot make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.