We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.

Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient.

The eye doesn't see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.

The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.