More dangers have deceived men than forced them.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes...and whatever lies upon the heart.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.