How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

La foiblesse de nostre condition, fait que les choses en leur simplicité et pureté naturelle ne puissent pas tomber en nostre usage...
Nostre extreme volupté a quelque air de gemissement, et de plainte.

Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things — We murder to dissect.

it comes to bless
Immortal things in their poor earthly dress

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves.

such cases it is vital to remember that scarce things do not taste or feel or sound or ride or work any better because of their limited availability.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.