The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.

I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

I think that one of the things is that, if you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation.

They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.

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

When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.