“Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.

Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

Moonlight is sculpture.

No art comes from the conscious mind.

A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.

We must link Azamgarh to art and culture and not with terrorism and crime.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It’s better that way.

The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men.

Poetry is the loveliest art. It has a wretched way of revealing our own character when we think we are judging the poets.