Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

When you are painting you should take a flat mirror and often look at your work within it, and it will then be seen in reverse, and will appear to be by the hand of some other master, and you will be better able to judge of its faults than in any other way.

The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.

The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.

Great love is born of great knowledge of the thing that is loved, and if you do not know it, you can love it little or not at all.

O time! swift devourer of all created things!

I have solved what color is, however ; I still have no idea about what line is.