“But perhaps the the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.”

“To create works of art meant no less to him than to paint life, not mere reality, but the principle of life.”

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”

“All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.”

“When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”