If It Be True That Any Beautiful

After Four Tortured Years, More Than 400 Over Life-sized Figures, I Felt As Old And As Weary As Jeremiah. I Was Only 37, Yet Friends Did Not Recognize The Old Man I Had Become.

A Good Sculpture Can Be Rolled Downhill Without Breaking.

How Wrong Are Those Simpletons, Of Whom The World Is Full, Who Look More At... Color Than At The Figures Which Show Spirit And Movement.

The Mind, The Soul, Becomes Ennobled By The Endeavour To Create Something Perfect, For God Is Perfection, And Whoever Strives After Perfection Is Striving For Something Devine.

There Is No Tongue To Speak His Eulogy; Too Brightly Burned His Splendour For Our Eyes: Far Easier To Condemn His Injurers, Than For The Tongue To Reach His Smallest Worth. He To The Realms Of Sinfulness Came Down, To Teach Mankind; Ascending Then To God, Heaven Unbarred To Him Her Lofty Gates, To Whom His Country Hers Refused To Ope. Ungrateful Land, To Its Own Injury Nurse Of His Fate! Well Too Does This Instruct, That Greatest Ills Fall To The Perfectest. And 'midst A Thousand Proofs, Let This Suffice, That, As His Exile Had No Parallel, So Never Was There Man More Great Than He.