When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.

If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.

Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life. Rodger Rosenblatt As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.

Let the painter composing narrative pictures take pleasure in wealth and variety, and avoid repeating any part that occurs in it, so that the uniqueness and abundance attract people to it and delight the eye of the observer. I say that a narrative painting requires (depending on the scene), wherever the eye falls, a mixture of men of diverse appearances, of diverse ages and dress, combined together with women, children, dogs, horses, buildings, fields, and hills.

Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.