It is by now well established that, by means of the integration by part identities, all the integrals occurring in the evaluation of a Feynman graph of given topology can be expressed in terms of a few independent master integrals. It is shown in this paper that the integration by part identities can be further used for obtaining a linear system of first order differential equations for the master integrals themselves. The equations can then be used for the numerical evaluation of the amplitudes as well as for investigating their analytic properties, such as the asymptotic and threshold behaviours and the corresponding expansions (and for analytic integration purposes, when possible). The new method is illustrated through its somewhat detailed application to the case of the one loop self-mass amplitude, by explicitly working out expansions and quadrature formulas, both in arbitrary continuous dimension n and in the n \to 4 limit. It is then shortly discussed which features of the new method are expected to work in the more general case of multi-point, multi-loop amplitudes.