The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implem… - Auguste Rodin

The biblical times have come back again, the great invasions of the Medes and the Persians. Has the world, then, reached the point where it deserves to be punished for the egotistical epicureanism in which it has slumbered?

I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art ; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think ; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks ; I try to put myself in the spiritual State of the men who hâve left us the antique statues. The 'Ecole' copies their works ; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass. Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was to find a method of exaggerating logically : that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedra! of Chartres ; one of the towers is massive and without ornament : they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite delicacy of the other tower.

As for me, seeker after truth and student of life as I am, I shall take care not to follow their example. I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them. Even when a subject which I am working on compels me to ask a model for a certain fixed pose, I indicate it to him, but I carefully avoid touching him to place him in the position, for I will reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me.
I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her.