“Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.”

“Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck, your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”

“I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.”

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”

“I know well that healing comes-if one is brave-from within, through profound resignation to suffering and death, through the surrender of your own will and of your self-love. But that is of no use to me; I love to paint, to see people and things and everything that makes our life-artificial, if you like. Yes, real life would be a different thing, but I do not belong to that category of souls who are ready to live and also at any moment to suffer. I am everything but courageous in sorrow, and everything but patient when I am not feeling well, though I have rather a good deal of patience in keeping to my work.”

“If you don’t have a dog--at least one--there is not necessarily anything wrong with you, but there may be something wrong with your life.”

“I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”