We know that all the arts are brothers, that each of them illuminates another, and that a universal light results.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

You must have the devil in you to succeed in the arts.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.