A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.
Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.
We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture.
When a thing bores you, do not do it.
If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.
Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul Seek solitude.
Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place. A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.
What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.
It is only possible to speak in the language and in the spirit of one's time.
[Photography is] in some ways false just because it is so exact.
One never paints violently enough.
Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.
Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.
The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.
If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.
Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.
