Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.
Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Ask the young. They know everything.
It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102.
Without duty, life is soft and boneless.
Life is a country that the old have seen, and lived in. Those who have to travel through it can only learn from them.
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.
Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear.
Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Space is to place as eternity is to time.
Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.
Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
Everything that is exact is short.
How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens!
I resemble the poplar, – that tree which, even when old, still looks young.