Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.

Tyrants forego all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it. Taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so, lose their participation with their kind, and in mimicking the god dwindle into the brute.

Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.

[Science is] the desire to know causes.

The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.

The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little uncomfortable, replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."