For his contemporaries, Racine was a romantic, but for every age he is classical, that is to say, he is faultless. - Eugène Delacroix

It is one of the saddest things in life that we can never be completely known and understood by any one man. (9 June 1823)

I am thinking of painting for the coming Salon a picture [probably the large and unfinished painting 'Botzaris' by Delacroix] whose subject I shall take from the recent wars between the Turks and the Greeks. I think that.. .. this would be a way to attract some attention. I should therefore like you to send me some drawings of the country round Naples, a few quick sketches of seascapes or picturesque mountain sites... Why not also send a few of the studies you have in your portfolio? You don’t need them while you are out there, and it would oblige you to make some more of them.

Nature is just a dictionary, you hunt in it for words.. ..you find in it the elements which make a phrase or a story; but nobody would regard a dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the term. Besides, nature is far from being always interesting from the point of view of the effect of the whole.. .If each detail is perfect in some way, the union of these details seldom gives an effect equivalent to that which arises, in the work of a great artist, from the total composition.