I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Mysteries are due to secrecy.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

Money is a great servant but a bad master.