Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.

Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne.

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

It is not necessity but abundance which produces greed.