“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”

“With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

“Sometimes a symbol holds more power than the thing it represents. Like the symbol for Thing, the one I created that is confusing and abstract and makes people ask, What is that thing? And I always reply, “If you already knew, why did you ask?”

“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.”

“In this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.”