“Intuition is a method of feeling one’s way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.”

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

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.

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.

There’s a great expression that says, “God is a jealous lover,” and it’s a very accurate expression that has nothing to do with whatever you see god or nature as.

I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It’s about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

That’ll be the day when I die.

A physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.