It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

Discover day to day excitement.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

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.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

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