Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.

The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.

The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.