The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.

We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.

A picture is a work of art, not because it is 'modern,' nor because it is 'ancient,' but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.

To the artist, the forest is an asylum of peace and dancing shadows.

Reserve is strength; overstatement is weakness. No one cares to hear the singer's topmost notes when the voice is 'nigh onto breaking.

Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul. We love suggestion and not hard facts.

In the anxiety to get beautiful colour harmony do not exhaust all combinations on one canvas.

Clouds are fascinating to paint because they are the only element in a landscape that possesses free movement.

Good colour really means good taste; and 'powerful' colour means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not 'red, white, and blue all over.

If you're going to paint from photos, make sure you've painted for at least ten years.

We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art.

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

The great pagan sadness of modern man is largely due to his premonition of ultimate disaster.

Failures and mistakes are definitely the greatest teachers to all great minds.

Unity is the most important thing on the road to stamping out terror. You need global rules of law and order, and they have to be enforced. Start with that principle.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

I have been married for 58 years to the same woman. Our secret? Separate bathrooms.

He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins.

At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.

And the passiveness, you know, the apathy, well, that's not responsible citizenship. When I'm asked, why am I an activist, I say, well that's the rent that I pay for living on this planet, okay?