The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.

I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.

I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full.

God is everywhere, in the smallest grain of sand.

The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.

The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand; there I represented it in the reeds.

What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.