Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.

A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration, but no rest.

To say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men.

Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affection; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar.