Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don't bother about life or honor ... and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

No one has mastery, Before he is at the end, Of his art and his life.

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.

As you give out, so shall you receive.