average human “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.

Make yourself a master of perspective, then acquire perfect knowledge of the proportions of men and other animals.

You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

Who sows virtue ought to reap honour.