“Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.”

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

One can always reason with reason.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else’s personality, that is not art.

When one is perfectly still-mind and body, silent and alone-there is no personality to speak of, thus personality is one’s unique way of expression, it is what others see and know of us, nothing more or deeper than that.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today.

Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human… No people will be truly free till all are free.

Attitudes on campuses often presage tendencies in the larger society. If that is so with respect to freedom of expression, the erosion of principle we have seen throughout our society in recent years may be only the beginning.

I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.

Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.