“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things. They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

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.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

I only want to exist in a love that lives in madness.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Power and energy games only exist in a relationship when the ego is at the wheel. When we heal our hearts, we can show up as mature beings in service to love.

In America, I don’t know how much longer the environment is going to exist. I sort of strongly believe that we’re in danger.

Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact.