The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.

States, as great engines, move slowly.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

But this is that which will dignify and exalt knowledge: if contemplation and action be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been: a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.