Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass.

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress.

Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.