One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its detail. Details are always vulgar.

Art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife.

The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.