“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”

X magazine (1959-62)
Context: The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity. It may be labouring the obvious to say so but it is too little recognised in art journalism now that a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas... A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object. It is judged by the painter simply as a success or failure without qualification. And it is something which happens in life not in art: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of. The old saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 250

Art Nonsense and Other Essays (1929), published by Cassell; quoted in Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit by Malcolm Yorke, published by Tauris Parke ISBN 1-86064-584-4, p. 49

Speech in Berlin (29 November 1924), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 330
1920s

The Great Chain of Life (1956), Chapter 9 "The Vandal and the Sportsman" http://books.google.com/books?id=Ydc0cooCB6QC&lpg=PA146&q="when+a+man+wantonly+destroys+one+of+the+works+of+man+we+call+him+vandal+when+he+wantonly+destroys+one+of+the+works+of+god+we+call+him+sportsman"#v=onepage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009, p. 148.

" The Problem of Increasing Human Energy http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm", Century Illustrated Magazine (June 1900)

El hombre, cuando no se lamenta, casi no existe.
Voces (1943)

Speech on "The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist," oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University at their anniversary (August 27, 1846)

Attributed to an anonymous Iranian in Shah of Shahs, Vintage International edition, p. 3