Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

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Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

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Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

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In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

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It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

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We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

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Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

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