The landscapist lives in silence.

Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.

The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying "this is mine" and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.