In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.
Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.
The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament.
The misfortune in the state is, that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern; and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account.
We learn to treasure what is above this earth; we long for revelation, which nowhere burns more purely and more beautifully than in the New Testament.
Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.
It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.
Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.
In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.
We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions.
What in us the women leave uncultivated, children cultivate when we retain them near us.
A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.
Man believes himself always greater than he is, and is esteemed less than he is worth.
No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.
The miller imagines that the corn grows only to make his mill turn.
Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.
Alas, that we should be so unwilling to listen to the still and holy yearnings of the heart! A god whispers quite softly in our breast, softly yet audibly; telling us what we ought to seek and what to shun.
Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.
Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.
I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them.