The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”