The oldest habit in the world for resisting change is to complain that unless the remedy to the disease should be universally applied it should not be applied at all. But you must start somewhere.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.
Armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left at a loose end, one cannot ’have several days on one’s hands.
Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing.
Every garden presents innumerable fascinating problems.
Watch your habits, they determine your character.
Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.
The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is a policy of first importance to a public man.
Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life’s journey.
The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.
I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.
The vistas of possibility are only limited by the shortness of life.
There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it.
A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.
In battles two things are usually required of the Commander-in-Chief: to make a good plan for his army and, secondly, to keep a strong reserve.
A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using and tiring it, just in the same way he can wear out the elbows of his coat.
It may be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.
Men will forgive a man anything except bad prose.
In Critical and baffling situations, it is always best to return to first principle and simple action.
There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies – And that is to fight without them.