For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.

Old age takes in part savoury wisdom for its food - see to that your old age will not lack in nourishment.

The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee...gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

Good writing comes from good talent.

You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.