"..the great Dutch school seemed to think of nothing but painting well the total absence of what today we call 'a subject'."

“Interpreting the Orient through the arts would destroy it, the artistic exploitation might eventually prove as harmful as military or political adventurism.”

“The art of painting is only the art of expressing the invisible by the visible. Whether its roads be great or small, they are sown with problems which it is permitted to sound for one's self as truth, but which it is well to leave in their darkness as mysteries.”

“What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives.. .The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes.”

“The things I haven't seen with my own eyes are for me unknown.”

“..that zone of consciousness through which all artists travel mentally, before ever approaching the easel.”

“..Africa: it's a magic word that lends itselfs to suppositions and sets amateur explorers to dreaming. I want to try to be 'at home' on this bit of foreign soil.”