Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.
I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.
To try to be better is to be better.
other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence.
No artist work is so high, so noble, so grand, so enduring, so important for all time, as the making of character is a child.
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
we cannot break a law of eternal justice, however ignorantly, but throughout the entire universe will there be a jar of discord that will so trouble the divine harmonies that in the rebound we shall find each man his own hell! The sooner we arrive at this knowledge, the sooner we take the certainty to our souls, the sooner do our lives begin to assume the square allotted to us.
Time the healer (Time the killer) flies faster here in Rome than anywhere else in the world, I believe ... here in Rome there are or seem to be strange differences in the value of things. For instance, the pound weight, instead of being sixteen ounces, is only twelve; the foot measure, instead of being twelve inches, is only nine; and I think, in some way, this must apply to time as well, so that the hour, instead of being sixty minutes long, is only forty-five!
There is a God! the sky his presence shares, His hand upheaves the billows in their mirth, Destroys the mighty, yet the humble spares And with contentment crowns the thought of worth.
Victor Hugo makes one of his heroines--an actress--say, "My art endows me with a searching eye, a knowledge of the soul and the soul's workings; and, spite of all your skill, I read to the depths." This is a truth more or less powerful, as one is more or less gifted by the good God.
