“I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.”

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

Acceptance is an act of the heart. To accept someone is to affirm to them that you think it’s a very good thing they are alive.

Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.

Affirmations don’t make something happen; they make something welcome.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.

I affirmed each sunrise, that I would attain my power back slowly but surely by being bold and letting go of my fear.

Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

God is not in a hurry to fix us. Our behavior is not his first priority. We are his first priority. Loving us, knowing us, affirming us, protecting us. That is his top goal and his main concern.