Whatever is enforced by command is more imputed to him who exacts than to him who performs.

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]

It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.

It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.