To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

Rodin argues that an artist’s task is not to hunt for conventional prettiness but to look steadily at reality. If the artist is “worthy of the name,” they do not flinch from wrinkles, roughness, asymmetry, or the ordinary; they accept the “exterior truth” of what is seen. From that faithful observation, the artist can discern and convey “inner truth”—character, emotion, vitality, or the underlying structure of life. Beauty, in this view, is not a narrow category of agreeable surfaces but the intelligibility and expressive meaning that emerges when perception is honest and attentive. The quote encapsulates a realist, humanist aesthetic often associated with Rodin’s sculpture: the visible body becomes a readable text of the invisible soul.