Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

How goodness heightens beauty!

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.