Auguste Rodin

Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!

If my modelling is bad, if I make faults in anatomy, if I misinterpret movement, if I am ignorant of the science which animates marble, the critics are right a hundred times. But if my figures are correct and full of life, with what can they reproach me? What right have they to forbid me to add meaning to form? How can they complain if, over and above technique, I offer them ideas? — if I enrich those forms which please the eye with a definite significance? It is a strange mistake, this, to imagine that the true artist can be content to remain only a skilled workman and that he needs no intelligence.

The nude alone is well dressed.

I showed her where she would find gold, but the gold she found is all hers.

My liberation from academicism was via Michelangelo. He is the bridge by which I passed from one circle to another.