If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

We must see whether the same clock with weights will go faster at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; it is probable, if the pull of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine, that the earth has real attraction.

Believe not much them that seem to despise riches, for they despise them that despair of them.

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.

...neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.