But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other specie...
AS YOU GIVE OUT SO SHALL YOU RECEIVE.
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
Critique by creating.
If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.
As when, O lady mine,With chiselled touchThe stone unhewn and coldBecomes a living mould,The more the marble wastes,The more the statue grows.
If I am more alive because love burns and chars me,as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation,it's that he who lays me low is my salvation,and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.
Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,While pain and guilt still linger here below,Blindness and numbness--these please me alone;Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.