What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

Imagination decides everything.

How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.