"How vain is painting, which is admired..." - Quote by Blaise Pascal

“Between us, and Hell or Heaven, there is only life between the two, which is the most fragile thing in the world.Variant: Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.”

“Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.”

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

“I would have liked to be - indeed, I should have been - a second Rembrandt.”

“Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.”

“The Muse is mute when public menApplaud a modern throne.”

“He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.”

“Why does the blind man's wife paint herself.”

“Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.”