Our spiritual attitude is determined by our conception of our relation to infinite spirit.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art but by no means all seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes or fails to come in the first conception and revision only affects the detail and ornament alas!

Belief is nothing but a more vivid lively forcible firm steady conception of an object than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.