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.

Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life.

In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.

...neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.