Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job an...d a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense ...a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes... of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a syste...m.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man, truly the animal that talks, is the only one that needs conversations to propagate its species.... In love conversations play... an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most talkative of all feelings and consists to a great extent completely of talkativeness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses,... and the mentally ill person has only one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, with...out man!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time w...as--to Plato and who else? The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »