“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it. Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.

One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.

Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

All children are essentially criminal.

If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

As if the ocean somehow doesn’t matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.