Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It’s just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

In art the best is good enough.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

There are many things that happen every day that we could murmur about if we let ourselves go there. But they really aren’t worth the effort it takes to get upset and gripe about it.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

With all due respect, I am against dumb.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.