You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.

Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.