“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.”

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.

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.

You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.

Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.

There was time for work, for play, for love, the confidence that if a task was not done at the appointed time, I easily could fit it into another hour. I used to take leisure for granted, as I did time itself.

In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.

I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.

My gold, my money couldn’t stop cancer from appearing on my body. If they can’t save me, then I don’t need them.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.