How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

I call architecture frozen music.

When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent.

But one must know where one stands, and where the others wish to go.

Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody's wish.

Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.

Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?