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.

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

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

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

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

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

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.