If it is the greatest truth that you seek, the plants can direct you.

To make an epoch in the world, two conditions are manifestly essential-a good head and a great inheritance.

Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.

The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.

Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."