As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself. |
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. |
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. |
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous. |
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. |
Nature never breaks her own laws. |
Our life is made by the death of others. |
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. |
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. |
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. |
Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes! |
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions. |
It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. |
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. |
Learning never exhausts the mind. |
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. |
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. |
Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it. |
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. |
Who sows virtue reaps honor. |