As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.

To regard such a positive mental science [psychology] as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature, is therefore possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.

The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts

All history is the history of thought.

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness

Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.

Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole.

There is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, ... , and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one's own life ... Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

The romantic artist expects people to ask, 'What has he got to say?' The classical artist expects them to ask, 'How does he say it?

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.