People From Paris

"My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct."

"I should have sent you news of myself long ago, for I know how much pleasure one derives from a letter during one's first days in the regiment. One needs it to be reminded that one is something more than a registered number and that in the past one's existence was different from that of beast. Anyway that is how I felt about the army. I was unable to connect my present existence with my former life as a civilian.. ..Here [in Paris in his studio in La Rue Pigalle] I am leading a studious and quite exemplary life.. .I am working on an important picture which is progressing well and which will be exhibited, I hope, at the [[W:Société des Artistes Indépendants|[Salon des] 'Indépendants]]. In addition I am planning to do a screen which will also be shown at the exhibition. Otherwise nothing is happening. I may go with Vuillard to see a music publisher, but I do not expect any success as yet in that direction. I have abandoned chromolithography (ouf!) for the moment, but I shall take it up again whenever I feel impelled to interrupt my oil painting, in order to vary my pleasure's."

"I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream."

"Paul Sérusier's story was exciting. From his summer vacation in Pont-Aven, in Brittany [Summer 1888], where he had briefly encountered Paul Gauguin, he had brought back a small landscape painted under Gauguin's direction. Gauguin had asked him, (as Sérusier told his Nabis friends October 1888 in Paris): 'How do you see these trees? They are yellow. Well then, put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue? So render it with pure-ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermilion.'"

"It would bother me if my canvases were stretched onto a frame. I never know in advance what dimensions I am going to choose."

"Bonnard was the humorist among us; his nonchalant gaiety, his wit was evident in his pictures [many of daily-life in the Paris' streets], in which a kind of satiric quality was always embodied n the decorative spirit.. .Bonnard did not resemble Denis or Vuillard in any way, yet all three approached life with a noble determination which was a god-send to me."

"[Bonnard] catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallises the most transient expressions."

"It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard; there's also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures."

"In Bonnard's work, Impressionism becomes insipid and falls into decline."

"[..according to Gauguin ] the impression of nature must be wedded to the aesthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies and synthesizes. The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination.. ..begotten in a union of his mind with reality. Gauguin insisted on a logical construction of composition, on a harmonious apportionment of light and dark colors, the simplification of forms and proportions, so as to endow the outline's of forms with a powerful and eloquent expression.. ..He also insisted upon luminous and pure colors."

"What part should nature play in a work of art? Where should the line be drawn? And from the standpoint of practical procedure - should one work directly from nature or merely study and remember it? Too much freedom frightens me, poor imitator that I am, and yet my head is filled with so many images evoked by what I see around me at all times that nature seems insignificant and banal."

"It may sometimes be necessary to yield the right, but how is one to recover it when wanted?"

"Love is almost the only passion that the good man may avow. It is the only one which accords with delicacy."

"Do nothing that all the world may not know."

"Recherché pleasures cause simple pleasures to lose all their attractions."

"The more nearly an object approaches perfection, the more we notice its slightest defects."

"The truly wise man is he who loves virtue for its own sake."

"To neglect the opportunity of an innocent pleasure is a loss to ourselves."

"We say that man is an egotist, and nevertheless his sweetest pleasures come to him through others. He only tastes them on condition of sharing them."

"Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare. Indulgence! Indulgence!"

"If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level."

"Hope being the greatest of all blessings, it is necessary, in order to be happy, to sacrifice the present to the future."

"In [1850]... Clausias... lays down a principle for use in the demonstration of Carnot’s proposition, which, while not the same in form as Thomson’s, is the same in content, and ranks as another statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Clausius followed up this paper by others, and subsequently published a book in which the subject of Thermodynamics was given a systematic treatment, and in which he introduced and developed the important function called by him the ."

"The science of Thermodynamics, founded by the labors of these three illustrious men, has led to the most important developments in all departments of physical science. It has pointed out relations among the properties of bodies which could scarcely have been anticipated in any other way; it has laid the foundation for the Science of Chemical Physics; and, taken in connection with the kinetic theory of gases, as developed by Maxwell and Boltzmann, it has furnished a general view of the operations of the universe which is far in advance of any that could have been reached by purely dynamical reasoning."

"To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, "Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?""

"Life is a short enough passage. I am half the journey. I will complete the remainder as I can."

"Carnot's reasoning... to show that in the ascent of the piston in the cylinder, more work is done against external forces than is required to be done by them to produce the descent and restore the piston to its first position. And in order that Carnot's axiom may be applied with strictness, and yet with simplicity, it is better to consider a hypothetical, than the actual engine."

"It is but bare justice... to acknowledge that Carnot himself was by no means satisfied with the caloric hypothesis and that he insinuates... more than a mere suspicion of its correctness."

"If we carefully examine the... cycle of operations we easily see that they are reversible, i.e., that the transference of the given amount of caloric back again... by performing the same operations in the opposite order, requires that we expend on the piston, on the whole, as much work as was gained during the direct operations. This most important idea is due to Carnot, and from it he deduces his test of a perfect engine, or one which yields from the transference of a given quantity of caloric from one body to another (each being at a given temperature) the greatest possible amount of work. And the test is simply that the cycle of operations must be reversible."

"[F]rom Carnot's point of view, it is evident that the motive power of heat depends upon its being transferred from one body to another through the medium by whose change of volume or form the external mechanical effect is produced, as this medium is supposed to remain at the end of the operation in precisely the same state as at the commencement. He gives as analogous the instance of work derived from water falling from a higher to a lower level."

"For a considerable portion of the present century, Davy's discoveries about heat were neglected, or only casually mentioned; but this was of comparatively little consequence, as their early reception might have kept back for a time the grand developments which must next be mentioned—immense strides in the theoretical and mathematical treatment of the subject, and to a considerable extent independent of the nature of heat. These are due to Fourier and Sadi Carnot, and it may well be said that it is in great part attributable to their remarkable works that the true theory of heat... received so rapidly its present enormous development. ...Very different in form and object from the systematic treatise of Fourier, is the profound and valuable essay of Sadi Carnot, Reflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu, published in 1824. The author endeavours to determine how it is that heat produces mechanical effect..."

"[W]e must remark the peculiar merit of Carnot's reasoning, which consists in the idea of bringing the body back to its initial state, as to temperature, density, and molecular condition, after a cycle of operations, before making any assertion as to the amount of heat which it contains."

"The criterion of what may be called a perfect thermo-dynamic engine is thus stated: A perfect thermo-dynamic engine is such, that, whatever amount of mechanical effect it can derive from a given thermal agency, if an equal amount be spent in working it backwards, an equal reverse thermal effect will be produced. Any two perfect engines, however different in their constructions, or in the physical media employed, must derive the same equivalent of mechanical effect from a given thermal agency. Carnot describes a steam-engine and an air-engine, each of which satisfies the criterion laid down above (the construction being however in each case, practically impossible); and he shews how, with certain physical data, with reference to steam in one case, and with reference to air or any gas in the other, the equivalent of mechanical effect, derivable from a given thermal agency, may be calculated."

"Carnot proved... that the ratio of the work done by a perfect (i.e., a reversible) engine to the heat taken from the source is a function of the temperatures of the source and condenser only. When these temperatures are nearly equal, this function is... called Carnot's Function. W. Thomson, so early as 1848, seized upon this remarkable proposition, and made it the basis of the earliest suggestion of an absolute Thermometric Scale; absolute in the sense of being based upon strict thermodynamic principles, and entirely independent of the properties of any particular substance."

"Men desire nothing so much as to make themselves envied."

"Egotism is the most common and most hated of all vices. Properly speaking, it is the only one which should be hated."

"I do not know why these two expressions, good sense and common sense, are confounded. There is nothing less common than good sense."

"When a hypothesis no longer suffices to explain phenomena, it should be abandoned. This is the case with... caloric as matter, as a subtile fluid. The experimental facts tending to destroy this theory are as follows: (1) The development of heat by percussion or the friction of bodies (experiments of Rumford, friction of wheels on... axles...). Here the elevation of temperature takes place at the same time in the body rubbing and the body rubbed. ...Thus heat is produced by motion. If... [caloric] is matter... matter is created by motion. (2) ...[A]ir compressed by the pumps must rise in temperature above the air outside, and it is expelled at a higher temperature. ...Thus heat has been created by motion."

"Clapeyron, in 1834, recalled attention to Carnot's reasoning, and usefully applied the principle of Watt's diagram of energy to the geometrical exhibition of the different quantities involved in the cycle of operations by which work is derived from heat by the temporary changes it produces in the volume or molecular state of bodies. He also first gave a representation of Carnot's processes in an analytical form. But for nearly twenty years after the appearance of Carnot's treatise little appears to have been done with reference to the theory of heat."

"In the present state of science... no operation is known by which heat can be absorbed into a body, without either elevating its temperature or becoming latent, and producing some alteration in its physical condition; and the fundamental axiom adopted by Carnot may be considered as still the most probable basis for an investigation of the motive power of heat; although this, and with it every other branch of the theory of heat, may ultimately require to be reconstructed on another foundation, when our experimental data are more complete. On this understanding the author of the present paper refers to Carnot's fundamental principle, as if its truth were thoroughly established."

"The pleasures of self-love are the only ones that can really be turned into ridicule."

"If we consider any case in which mechanical effect is obtained from a thermal origin, by means of the alternate expansions and contractions of any substance whatever, and follow a perfectly rigorous process of reasoning indicated by Carnot, we arrive at the following conclusion... The thermal agency by which mechanical effect may be obtained, is the transference of heat from one body to another at a lower temperature."

"Show neither passion nor weariness in discussion."

"Never direct an argument against any one. If you know some particulars against your adversary, you have a right to make him aware of it to keep him under control, but proceed with discretion, and do not wound him before others."

"When discussion degenerates into dispute, be silent; this is not to declare yourself beaten."

"Listen attentively to your interlocutor, and so prepare him to listen in the same way to your reply, and predispose him in favor of your arguments."

"Speak to every one of that which he knows best. This will put him at his ease, and be profitable to you."

"Abstain from all pleasantry which could wound."

"How much modesty adds to merit! A man of talent who conceals his knowledge is like a branch bending under a weight of fruit."

"Employ only expressions of the most perfect propriety."