“Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.”

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art…our world would have remained a jungle.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.

I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament… the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique – without which however it cannot exist at all.

One can repent even of having repented.

I never read reviews. I’m not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators.

You’re probably impatient with the one person that triggers a strong negative emotional reaction in you.

The only thing you can control in life is your reaction to situations as they unfold. 

A revolutionary woman can’t have no reactionary man. If he’s not about liberation, if he’s not about struggle, if he ain’t about building a strong Black family, if he ain’t about building a strong Black nation, then he ain’t about nothing.

You can’t control the situation, but you can control how you react to the problem. ⁣

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.