The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colors assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.

O Time with your teethy years! You swallow up all things little by little in a slow-motion, wrinkling process of dying.

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.

The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.

The eye transmits its own image through the air to all the objects which face it, and also receives them on its own surface, whence the “sensus communis

Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

The memory of benefits is a frail defense against ingratitude.

The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness.

The great man presides over all his states of consciousness with obstinate rigor.

Nothing is so much to be feared as Evil Report.