Quotes to inspire and reflect

No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

‘Oh Grandmother! What big ears you have!’

Anne, ma sœur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?

Tyranny is always better organised than freedom.

The power of positive thinking.

Cry, the beloved country.

Wine may well be considered the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

FIRE . God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

‘God is or he is not.’ But to which side shall we incline? … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces [the heavens] terrifies me.

Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.

When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.

I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply callisthenics with words.

She ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B.

Excuse my dust.

By the time you say you’re his,

Where’s the man could ease a heart like a satin gown?

Guns aren’t lawful;

If, with the literate, I am

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

Four be the things I’d been better without:

Men seldom make passes

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Let us sleep now.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

Whatever hope is yours,

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

All a poet can do today is warn.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.