I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.
There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.
To say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men.
This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.
The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.