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

It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.