The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.
Crowns have their compass-length of days their date-
Triumphs their tomb-felicity, her fate-
Of nought but earth can earth make us partaker,
But knowledge makes a king most like his Maker.
The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.
By this means we presume we have established for ever, a true and legitimate marriage between the Empirical and Rational faculty; whose fastidious and unfortunate divorce and separation hath troubled and disordered the whole race and generation of mankind.
I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.
For there is a great difference in delivery of the mathematics , which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy , which is the most immersed. And howsoever contention hath been moved , touching a uniformity of method in multiformity of matter, yet we see how that opinion, besides the weakness of it, hath been of ill desert towards learning, as that which taketh the way to reduce learning to certain empty and barren generalities; being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method.
The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.