Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.

Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man's self; and where there is no comparison, no envy.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this-that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

It cannot be denied that outward accidents conduce much to fortune, favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion fitting virtue; but chiefly, the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!