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.