Already at 16, my mind was a battlefield: my love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with my religious faith. A polarity of themes and forms - one spiritual, the other earthly.

His hope is treacherous only whose love dies with beauty, which is varying every hour, bit, in chaste hearts uninfluenced by the power of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower, that breathes on earth the air of paradise.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.

The power of one fair face makes my love sublime, for it has weaned my heart from low desires.