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.

Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, tanquam tabula naufragii: when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

It is nothing won to admit men with an open door, and to receive them with a shut and reserved countenance.

It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.

The genius of any single man can no more equal learning, than a private purse hold way with the exchequer.