Men leave their riches either to their kindred or their friends, and moderate portions prosper best in both.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.

The colors that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green.

Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools.

The human understanding, when any preposition has been once laid down... forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although more cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet it either does not observe them or it despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.