Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.

A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

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.

One never paints violently enough.

Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.

A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.

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.

To see the Summer SkyIs Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—True Poems flee—

Would it surprise you to know that a presence was on your back a few seconds ago?

Time alone reveals the just man but you might discern a bad man in a single day.

Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.

When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

I'm not worried about the Third World War. That's the Third World's Problem.

It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.

Some wounds go so deep that you don't even feel them until months, maybe years, later.

I found in direct selling companies an education system designed to draw out the rich person in you.

I really feel that if I did another [Narnia] film I'd just be repeating myself and I don't really want to do that as an actor.