“What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God's omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings [of a. o. Caspar David Friedrich ] are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them.”

“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.”

“Sympathy, Love, Fortune… We all have these qualities but still tend to not use them!”

“God gives us ministers of love,
Which we regard not, being near;
Death takes them from us, then we feel
That angels have been with us here!”

“We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.”

“Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.... but no program, no instruction in painting.... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting – the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting..”

“We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.”

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”

“I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.”

“I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.”