Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?

Ego very much wants to make you think that your self worth is all about what you possess, what you've accomplished, and who you know.

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

To be able to dispense with good things is tantamount to possessing them.

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all.

I'll be wearing my high heels, even if I'm up to my knees in mud

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

You don't really know what you're going to get until you're actually in Abbey Road. That's where I did all the music, in The Beatles' place.

In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.