All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion.

Truth is a naked and open daylight

...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know

If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.

A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object.

Money is like muck, not good unless spread.

I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.