The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.

Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.

I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.

Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.