“I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.”

“A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.”

“If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?”

“I think to be an artist it means a certain sensitivity, because I believe in evolution. I believe the more sensitive you are the more you draw from this One Mind; which is part of the whole, part of everything. I think we all have that ability to be tuned in, but I think great artists are just more tuned in. One who's expressing God to the fullest, that's an artist.”

“His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.”

“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.”

“He deliberately rejects the classic beauty of the form for the sake of fragility, transience or simply greater sensitivity to what is present. His work has a mockery and ironic character. He looks critically and with great apprehension at Poland, he does it from the perspective of an emigrant, from culturally and socially different Netherlands, which became a new homeland for him.”

“Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not — in his mind — undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.”

“The notion of innate knowledge (including moral knowledge) is rejected, but that of moral sensitivities is accepted.”

“The mind might become forgetful of great deeds, but the soul does not forget anything that it considers to be beautiful and good.”