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Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it.
if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater?
some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind.
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development.
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.
For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a ‘month or twain to feed on honeycomb,’ but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.
The secret of life is suffering!
The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.
At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all.
Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.
I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, ‘Yes! this is just where the artistic life leads a man!’
The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.
