Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.