“I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.”

“I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.”

“I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.”

“The applause was so loud and insistent that I had to respond with several encores. I was numb with happiness, when it was over, I knew that this alone must be my life and my world.”

“Die Idee der Schönheit ist die Idee der unendlichen Traurigkeit; die Idee dessen, was hätte sein können.”

“Life is a series of boring interludes between meals.”

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”