Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.
Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.
I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.
Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind
Disciples do owe their masters only a temporary belief, and a suspension of their own judgment till they be fully instructed.
It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.
There was never miracle wrought by God to convert an atheist, because the light of nature might have led him to confess a God.
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts.
In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.
It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives
Mark what a generosity and courage (a dog) will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God
Certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes...and whatever lies upon the heart.
To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.
I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.
For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.
The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.
Parents who wish to train up their children in the way they should go must go in the way in which they would have their children go.
Be not penny-wise. Riches have wings. Sometimes they fly away of themselves, and sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.
In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.
I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.
When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.
All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
In mathematics I can report no deficiency, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of Pure Mathematics.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.
That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.
Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.
For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs.
I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, "Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner."
The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.
I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.
Real knowledge never promoted either turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is the forerunner of liberality and enlightened toleration.
Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
The divisions of science are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk.
He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.'
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
If a man's wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores, splitters of hairs.