All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.

In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.