The artist is chosen by God to fulfill his commands and must never be overwhelmed by public opinion.

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.

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.

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.

Some think that they know everybody, but they really don't know themselves.

An artist of understanding and experience can show more of his great power and art in small things roughly and rudely done, than many another in a great work. A man may often draw something with his pen on a half sheet of paper in one day . . . . and it shall be fuller of art and better than another's great work whereon he hath spent a whole year's careful labor.