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.

I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.

One of the fathers saith . . . that old men go to death, and death comes to young men.

It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one.