By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Art helps nature, and experience art.

The artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.

The work of art is a part of nature seen through a temperament.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

There is no better deliverance from the world than through art; and a man can form no surer bond with it than through art.

The fact that all of us die anyway (the rumor turns out to be true) is a mere detail in the celestial glow of imagination. The artist's eyes destroy death.