We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us…

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments. For having given a beginning, what follows from it must necessarily be a natural development of such a beginning, unless it has been subject to a contrary influence, while, if it is affected by any contrary influence, the result which ought to follow from the aforesaid beginning will be found to partake of this contrary influence in a greater or less degree in proportion as the said influence is more or less powerful than the aforesaid beginning.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Nature never breaks her laws.

Wherever good fortune enters, envy lays siege to the place and attacks it; and when it departs, sorrow and repentance remain behind.

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images which are all-pervading and each complete, each conveying the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.

Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past.

Amid the vastness of the things among which we live, the existence of nothingness holds the first place; its function extends over all things that have no existence, and its essence, as regards time, lies precisely between the past and the future, and has nothing in the present.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.

We see the most striking example of humility in the lamb which will submit to any animal; and when they are given for food to imprisoned lions they are as gentle to them as to their own mother, so that very often it has been seen that the lions forbear to kill them.

To speak well of a base man is much the same as speaking ill of a good man.

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

Shadow is not the absence of light, merely the obstruction of the luminous rays by an opaque body.

The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.

Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.