You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

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

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

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