Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.

Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously.

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.