“Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.”

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

Respectable people, What bastards!

Everything is only a dream.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

Lovers are made by a kiss.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

With each passing moment of life, we learn lesson, but it is upto us to affirm and grow from that.

Beauty is not skin-deep; it can be a means of self-affirmation, a true indicator of personality and confidence.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

Acceptance is an act of the heart. To accept someone is to affirm to them that you think it’s a very good thing they are alive.

Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.

Affirmations don’t make something happen; they make something welcome.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.