All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time.

If you are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century, but the master of eternity.

There never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.

No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and shade, or proximity to other things, it will not look beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. I believe that in every twenty-four hours what is beautiful looks ugly, and what is ugly looks beautiful, once.

Do not wait for life to be picturesque, but try and see life under picturesque conditions.

We never know what an artist is going to do. Of course not. The artist is not a specialist. All such divisions as animal painters, landscape painters, painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist, painters of English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters, bull-terrier painters, all are shallow. If a man is an artist he can paint everything.

There is nothing that Art cannot express

Le public est extraordinairement tolérant. Il pardonne tout, sauf le génie.

art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.