Artists who seek perfection in everything achieve it in nothing (14 March 1858) - Eugène Delacroix

The landscape [in the painting 'The Bathers', 1853, by Courbet ] is of an extraordinary vigor, but Courbet has done no more than enlarge a study exhibited there, near his large canvas; the conclusion is that the figures [the two bathers in the painting] were put in afterwards and without connection with their surroundings. This brings up the question of harmony between the accessories and the principal object, a thing lacking in the majority of great painters, [15 April 1853]

He Titian is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias, one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand than to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion.

Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art (23 August 1854).