“What does it all mean?' I said.'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it.”

“No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.”

“I wish I had [made that song]. No, I don't That would be to take it from somebody else. But it's mine for all that.''What makes it yours?''I love it so.''Does loving a thing make it yours?''I think so, Mother -- at least more than anything else can. . . . Love makes the only myness,' said Diamond.”

“But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"Not what he pleases, but what he can.”

“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.”

“Let death do what it can, there is just one thing it cannot destroy, and that is life. Never in itself, only in the unfaith of man, does life recognize any sway of death.”

“If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine, the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the Hell of Hells.”