Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors.

Of all the disorders in the soul, envy is the only one no one confesses to.

The state of life is most happy where superfluities are not required and necessities are not wanting.

It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur. If the number and variety of subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results.

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.

For man is a plant, not fixed in the earth, nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising as it were from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven.