“Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!”

“Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

“You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infinite space, galaxies, all this is frightening, exactly because it transcends the limits of our perception.”

“This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean acceptingthe loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - merepossibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of painthat for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of theinvisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of theincalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate ofthis tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed intomadness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners;of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have towatch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, asthe monstrous darkness approaches.”

“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.”

“Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”