We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

Banality is like boredom: bored people are boring people, people who think that things are banal are themselves banal.Interesting people can find something interesting in all things.

I see God every day... For God is in everything I see.

Meditation is wondering. It is both wondering and wonder.

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet.

To give ourselves totally to another person, as we do in marriage, is the most trusting step we take in any human relationship.

I'm happy to help people.

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

I can walk around relatively anonymously.

Spirit is the most valuable asset, more than money and any other power.