Genius Is Infinite Painstaking.

The Best Of Artists Hath No Thought To Show Which The Rough Stone In Its Superfluous Shell Doth Not Include; To Break The Marble Spell Is All The Hand That Serves The Brain Can Do.

If It Be True That Any Beautiful Thing Raises The Pure And Just Desire Of Man From Earth To God, The Eternal Fount Of All, Such I Believe My Love.

What One Has Most To Work And Struggle For In Painting Is To Do The Work With A Great Amount Of Labour And Sweat In Such A Way That It May Afterward Appear, However Much It Was Laboured Upon, To Have Been Done Almost Quickly And Almost Without Any Labour, And Very Easily, Although It Was Not.

Let It Be Enough For You To Have Bread And Live Virtuously And Poorly Like Christ, As I Do Here. I Live Meanly And Don't Bother About Life Or Honor ... And I Live With The Greatest Toil And A Thousand Worries. It Is Now About 15 Years Since I Had A Happy Hour.

I Give My Soul To God, My Body To The Earth, And My Worldly Possessions To My Nearest Of Kin, Charging Them To Remember The Sufferings Of Jesus Christ.