It astonishes me already when I compare my condition today with what it was a month ago. Before that I knew well enough one could fracture one's legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.

If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.

The great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.

For me work is an absolute necessity, indeed I can't really drag it out, I take no more pleasure in anything than in work, that's to say, pleasure in other things stops immediately and I become melancholy if I can't get on with the work.

For loneliness, worries, difficulties, the unsatisfied need for kindness and sympathy - that is what is hard to bear.

Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.

Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.