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.

In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some one whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

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

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.