The world is divided into two classes - invalids and nurses.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

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

Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.

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.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.