A luminous body will appear more brilliant in proportion as it is surrounded by deeper shadow.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

The discovery of a good wine is increasingly better for mankind than the discovery of a new star.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.