Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

• An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
• For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
• Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
• For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
• All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
• It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
• The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
• It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
• Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
• It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.