It is this book ['The Imitation of Christ'] that has helped me lead my life which such serenity and has always left me with a contended heart. I has … - Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

..and, to tell the truth, I find it very difficult to like new art. It is only lately, and after having been unsympathetic for a great while, that I at last understood Eugene Delacroix, whom I now think a great man.

My spirits.. ..now lean towards sadness and melancholy. I too am beginning to feel my age. Then, as one moves on in life sorrows multiply, and necessarily it is harder to keep cheerful.. .[I experienced] violent disappointments, that I might even call grief.

You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon.. .Ah, a first ray of sunshine!