When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

Space is the stature of God.

Ornaments were invented by modesty.

Truth consists of having the same idea about something that God has.

A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.