Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

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.

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.