One can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals, I have found. It is revealing of an aspect of their character that they would otherwise repress, given that it has no (other) socially acceptable mode of expression. By their actions we may know them...

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."