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.

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

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.

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

The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.