For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
• The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
• A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
• Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
• A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
• Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
• Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
• After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
• There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.