The job of the artist is to always deepen the mystery.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost. The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

If I try to be like him, who will be like me?

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

All glory comes from daring to begin.

Dare to be naive.

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful but because it is like himself.

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.

There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened."

Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of being created so as to understand them to some degree.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

The beginning of all understanding is classification.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.

If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable...

Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.

There are many artists who...see their value and justification in novelty; but they are wrong. Novelty is hardly ever important. What matters is always this one thing: to penetrate to the very heart of a thing, and create it better.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

If you're going through hell, keep going.

Creativity is the ability to go from one failure to another without the loss of enthusiasm.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Each for the joy of working; And each in his separate star, Shall draw the thing as he sees it; For the God of Things as They Are.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Photographs...are like images in the memory of a total stranger.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.