Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs.

I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.

Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.