It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness; as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns; children, women, old folks, sick folks. Only men must beware, that they carry their anger rather with scorn, than with fear; so that they may seem rather to be above the injury, than below it; which is a thing easily done, if a man will give law to himself in it.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.

If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.

The first question concerning the Celestial Bodies is whether there be a system, that is whether the world or universe compose together one globe, with a center, or whether the particular globes of earth and stars be scattered dispersedly, each on its own roots, without any system or common center.