He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.

The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.

Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.

The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.