Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

We revel in the laxness of the path we take.