People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

Truth is a naked and open daylight

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.

Love and envy make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.