Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.