Be so true to thyself, as thou be not false to others.
You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn’t work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it.
But the images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.
All will come out in the washing.
The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.
It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.
So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top.
All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race, nor alienate so much property, as drunkenness.
A king that would not feel his crown too heavy for him, must wear it every day; but if he think it too light, he knoweth not of what metal it is made.
I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.
I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.
Come home to men’s business and bosoms.
They who derive their worth from their ancestors resemble potatoes, the most valuable part of which is underground.
My praise shall be dedicated to the mind itself. The mind is the man, and the knowledge is the mind. A man is but what he knoweth. The mind is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is the double of that which is.
Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.
Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they rise. For the distance is altered, and it is like a deceit of the eye, that when others come on they think themselves go back.
Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts.
The cord breaketh at last by the weakest pull.
Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.
I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.