He [ Michelangelo ] did not know a single one of the feelings of man, not one of his passions. When he was making an arm or a leg, it seems as if he … - Eugène Delacroix

Poor deluded people, there will be no happiness for you in release from work! See these idle loafers who seem overburdened with the weight of time and have no idea what to do with their leisure which these machines will increase still further. In other times, travelling was a distraction for them, it took them out of their usual rut; they saw new countries and new customs…Nowadays they are carried so swiftly from place to place that they have no time to see anything; they mark off the stages of their journeys by names of railway stations which look exactly alike, and when they’ve crossed the whole of Europe they feel as though they have never left these dull stations which appear to follow them everywhere, like their own idleness and incapacity for enjoyment. It will not be long before they discover that the costumes and strange customs which they crossed the earth to see are the same all over the world. (6 June 1855).

How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?.. .Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a.o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.

In adversity people regain all the virtues which they lose in prosperity (30 January 1855)