You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn't work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it.

The mold of our fortunes is in our own hands.

Of all the things in nature, the formation and endowment of man was singled out by the ancients.

Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

Nothing is to be feared but fear itself. Nothing grievous but to yield to grief.

There is a cunning which we in England call the rning of the cat in the pan.