Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death be like autumn leaves. Rabindranath Tagore What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

If you work with love and intelligence, you develop a kind of armour against people's opinions, just because of the sincerity of your love for nature and art. Nature is also severe and, to put it that way, hard, but never deceives and always helps you to move forward.

One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.

It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals.

The victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner.

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.