I am not arguing with you — I am telling you. - James McNeill Whistler

John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?'
Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.'

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.