The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.

Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake.

Excellence is rarely found, more rarely valued.

God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.

Our passions are true phoenixes; as the old burn out the new straight rise up from the ashes.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.