Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Don't let your past dictate your future,

If a friend starts behaving silly because you bother him so much, don't worry, you're not the first person, he has got a sting in his stomach, an hunger that causes an epidemic hatred.

Let me be dressed fine as I will Flies worms and flowers exceed me still.

The world reflects back to you how much you value yourself.

You can always spot bright people. They are reading a book.

The cross of Christ exists because mankind-loved by God, created by God, set in motion by God-betrayed God and prefers his stuff to him.

I have a serious investment problem. I have no money.

From a young age I had learned to get over--to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve.

These are the people who do studies that your carry-out Chinese meals are saturated in fat. I'd just like to meet them! I mean, what do they do for pleasure?

Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records