I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

For cleanness of body was ever esteemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse.

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.