Drawing is the necessary beginning of everything [in Art], and not having it, one has nothing.

In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.

Paolo Uccello's wife told people that Paolo used to stay up all night in his study trying to work out the vanishing points of his perspective. When she called him to come to bed, he would say "Oh what a lovely thing this perspective is!"

Drawing is the necessary beginning of everything [in Art], and not having it, one has nothing.

The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath.

As long as art lives never shall I accept that men are truly dead.

One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun