I wish to work miracles.

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

You don't get into trouble because of the things you don't know. It is the things you don't know you don't know that really get you into a mess.

If we make mistakes in our first compositions and do not know them, we may not amend them.

It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.