There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.

Alas for the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give the bread of life.

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego the yolk of men's opinions. I will be light-hearted as a bird and live with God. I find him in the bottom of my heart, and I hear continually his voice therein.