The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

Wise sayings are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered.