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

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

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.

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.

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

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.

We should never allow that the scars on our heart change the way we love – no matter how deep they run.

Allow your heart to paint a hopeful sky of miracles.

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, – will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, – or to diminish something of their pains.

This climate law is surrender – because nature doesn’t bargain and you cannot make ”deals” with physics. And we will not allow you to surrender on our future.

I allowed myself to fall knowing full well you would never catch me.

We make allowance for a certain degree of selfishness in men; because we know it to be inseparable from human nature, and inherent in our frame and constitution. By this reflexion we correct those sentiments of blame, which so naturally arise upon any opposition.

How will you ever be able to heal your broken parts, if you keep allowing the past to stay?

Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.