Life swarms with innocent monsters.

My concern today is with the painting of manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.