No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.

Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.

I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.

Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.

I call architecture frozen music.

Let's plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will -- it's only action that can make a man.