The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.

Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.