“Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.”

To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.

Man is summed up in Art. All the rest is moonshine.

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.

He would not stoop even to pick up the old manuscript I am going to seek with so much trouble and fatigue. And in truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.

Our passions are ourselves.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

Your heart has always known; the work is to shovel enough mind rubble to hear it speak.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

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.

(1) Never give anything away for nothing. (2) Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). (3) Always take everything back if you possibly can.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

To a mind like mine, restless, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.

Open your mind and let the pictures out