I love what tenaciousness is left in my eyes, in my abandoned rooms where lives the moon, and my spiders, and the destructions that are dear to me, I love my being lost, my imperfect substance.
Make sure everyone that comes your way leaves feeling better and happier.
The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.
What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don't stop. I want music tonight. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you. I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.
[...]
My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.
Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.
We're good at nothing but capable of anything.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
I want there to be at every factory and mine exit my poetry fixed on the ground, in the air, on the victory of mistreated man.
There are moments when life gives you moments of unexpected beauty. You stop doing something and you realize that around you everything is perfect, the gift of a less distracted God than usual. Everything seems sincere. The birth of a new life, the dawn of change, something deep or simply the confirmation of a love kept hidden, of a secret feeling, kept silently within us modestly or even the end of something, the end of a moment, of a difficult period always harder to sustain... when our short breaths end, giving way to a long and deep one that fills and empties the chest... in those moments I'm wanting for nothing...