Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

History develops, art stands still.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

A person's character is but half formed till after wedlock.

Never go backward. Attempt, and do it with all your might. Determination is power.

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

He who defends everything defends nothing.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.

We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.

It's how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success.

When one must, one can.

Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Man cannot live by incompetence alone.

Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and - too often - for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can 'grow' longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child's play and the focus of adult art and adult fear.

Dolls, perhaps more than any other object, demonstrate just how thin the line between love and fear, comfort and horror, can be. They are objects of love and sources of reassurance for children, coveted prizes for collectors, sources of terror and horror in numerous movies, television shows, books, and stories.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.