It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.

• It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
• The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
• Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
• Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
• There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
• The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
• Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
• Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
• Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
• Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.