“Why assume that to look is to see?”

“Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.”

“For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.”

“All things considered, there is only Matisse.”

“If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.”

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.”

“The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musican, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.”

“The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.”

“When we are high and airy hundreds sayThat if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,While those same hundreds mock another dayBecause we have made our art of common things.”

“A lot of guys have had a lot of fun joking about Henry Ford because he admitted one time that he didn't know history. He don't know it, but history will know him. He has made more history than his critics ever read.”

“We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public.”

“What need the bridge much broader than the flood?”

“Away, you trifler! Love! I love thee not,I care not for thee, Kate: this is no worldTo play with mammets and to tilt with lips:We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns.”

“Waste not thy time in windy argument but let the matter drop.”

“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

“The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”

“Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.”

“Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.”

“I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.”