Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

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.

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.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

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.

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.