Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can't erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Fortune makes him fool, whom she makes her darling.

It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.

There is no doubt but men of genius and leisure may carry our method to greater perfection, but, having had long experience, we have found none equal to it for the commodiousness it affords in working with the Understanding.