Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

He is fairer than the morning star, and whiter than the moon. For his body I would give my soul, and for his love I would surrender heaven.

If God wished to punish us, all he would need to do would be to answer our prayers.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.