“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.

Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.

Yet what it takes to win races is the ability to reach inside and pull out something to keep you going – no, to go faster – when you have nothing left to give.

For nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.

Nothing is creepier than a bunch of adults being very quiet.

State interference in economic life, which calls itself economic policy, has done nothing but destroy economic life. Prohibitions and regulations have by their general obstructive tendency fostered the growth of the spirit of wastefulness.

The truth is scary, but knowing nothing is crippling.

I’ve always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn’t overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn’t ambitious.

Nothing can be forced, receptivity is everything.