For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony.

He who does not master the nude cannot understand the principles of architecture.

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?

Genius is eternal patience.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.