“You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.”

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

Christianity … that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried… A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.

It’s not that women are less corruptible than men are, it’s that women have had less chance to become corrupt.

Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

Our government is built upon the vote. But votes that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government built on them stands upon corruption and revolution.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

Government ought to be all outside and no inside. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.