Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there... are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That's why art moves you--precisely because it's unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures per...fect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts tha...n the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non...intellectuals have never stirred.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficultie...s of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin an...d the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »