“German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.”

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.

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 try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.

The University of Google is where I got my degree from.

Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

Pleasure admitted in undue degree, enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.