There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.

Four varieties in society: lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.

Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!