Men leave their riches either to their kindred or their friends, and moderate portions prosper best in both.
I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more or less literally.
If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.
The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.
There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious.
Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry.
Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
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.