From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.

Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is not a trifle

The greatest risk to man is not that he aims to high and misses, but that he aims to low and hits.

The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

Already at sixteen, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms: one spiritual, the other earthly.