And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. . .

No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty.

Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it. Thus, beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.

My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.

Sight is the noblest sense of man.