If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it’s that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.
Do you know that women who are chaste remain much fresher than those who are not?
The mind, the soul, becomes ennobled by the endeavour to create something perfect, for God is perfection, and whoever strives after perfection is striving for something devine.
However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man.
To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.
Souls will never ascend to Heaven until the sight of beauty lifts them there.
It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man.
The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.
It is necessary to keep one’s compass in one’s eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.
Critique by creating.
Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.
I live and love in God’s peculiar light.
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.