[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.

Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true

To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.

Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.