Human beings are so strangely constructed that they often find consolation and even happiness in misfortune (for instance, when ones is unjustly pers… - Eugène Delacroix

To be like other people is the real condition of happiness. Sea air and diversions are producing this miraculous effect upon me. What you need is just the contrary. You are dying of boredom from what most mortals regard as bliss – having nothing to do. You need the treatment opposite to mine; I am not joking in the very least: one has to be compelled to some task, driven to it: anyone who is not a drunken brute must achieve boredom at all costs unless he can discover the secret of a taste for amusements.. .These reflections.. ..are not likely to comfort you, but they will change your frame of mind for a few minutes. I shall probably be back in Paris on Thursday...

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

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.