"I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada. The first Holy Virgins I painted date from 1886, when I was a few months old and amused myself by pissing graphic impressions. The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit."

"I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin."

"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred."

"We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!"

"Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped."

"The creation of the 'Polish Corridor' running from Upper Silesia to Danzig thus left East Prussia as a bleeding chunk of Germany between the Vistula and the Niémen. Was Danzig really a free city? Or was it actually a Polish captive? And was that also the true situation of East Prussia? To assert their claims, the Poles sought to monopolize the Danzig postal service; at the same time, they constructed a rival port, Gdynia, to divert commerce away from the Free City. Danzigers who wished to travel to Germany (including Prussia) required a Polish transit visa. The poisoned atmosphere generated by such petty sources of friction is well preserved in Günter Grass's Danzig trilogy, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. It is no accident that the most memorable fictional personification of the German catastrophe, the stunted drummer Oscar Matzerath, is born in Danzig in 1924."

"The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its Creator—permit me to use this human simile—the first duty of all thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one appearance in nature—the thinking being. The great compound called the world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself understandable to intelligence—the alphabet by means of which all spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another. Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor, because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let me perceive my relationship with that Being."

"Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way that virtue and religion suffer no detriment if a criminal denies them."

"Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom."

"The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the condition in which their birth has placed then."

"The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual."

"The most pious man can't stay in peace If it doesn't please his evil neighbor."

"A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast."

"What's old collapses, times change, And new life blossoms in the ruins."

"No cause has he to say his doom is harsh, Who's made the master of his destiny."

"This feat of Tell, the archer, will be told While yonder mountains stand upon their base. By heaven! The apple's cleft right through the core."

"You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you."

"Who reflects too much will accomplish little."

"The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it."

"Wir wollen sein ein einzig Volk von Brüdern, in keiner Not uns trennen und Gefahr. Wir wollen frei sein, wie die Väter waren, eher den Tod, als in der Knechtschaft leben. Wir wollen trauen auf den höchsten Gott und uns nicht fürchten vor der Macht der Menschen."

"The strong man is strongest when alone."

"Time is man's angel."

"What is life without the radiance of love?"

"There's no such thing as chance; And what to us seems merest accident Springs from the deepest source of destiny."

"The world is narrow, broad the mind— Thoughts dwell easily side by side Things collide violently in space"

"Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning."

"Virtue has her heroes too As well as Fame and Fortune."

"I have only an office here, and no opinion."

"Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse."

"The empire of Saturnus is gone by; Lord of the secret birth of things is he; Within the lap of earth, and in the depths Of the imagination dominates; And his are all things that eschew the light. The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance, For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now, And the dark work, complete of preparation, He draws by force into the realm of light. Now must we hasten on to action, ere The scheme, and most auspicious positure Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight, For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not."

"The hat is the pride of man; for he who cannot keep his hat on before kings and emperors is no free man."

"The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate."

"When the wine goes in, strange things come out."

"You say it as you understand it."

"In thy breast are the stars of thy fate."

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason."

"My son, there's nothing insignificant, Nothing! But yet in every earthly thing First and most principal is place and time."

"Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg."

"What is the short meaning of the long speech?"

"Whatever is not forbidden is permitted."

"Life is earnest, art is gay."

"He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times."

"Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators."

"The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity."

"While the womanly god demands our veneration, the godlike woman kindles our love; but while we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe."

"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."

"Lebe mit deinem Jahrhundert, aber sei nicht sein Geschöpf; leiste deinen Zeitgenossen, aber was sie bedürfen, nicht was sie loben."

"No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite."

"As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys."

"They have founded the whole structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name."