The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.