I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.
A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.
For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Nature never breaks her own laws.
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.
Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.
Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.
The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.