To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

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.

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.