It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one.
Let no one think or maintain that a person can search too far or be too well studied in either the book of God’s word or the book of God’s works.
Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb; Keep clean, be as fruit, earn life, and watch, Till the white-wing’d reapers come.
Fortune makes him fool, whom she makes her darling.
That which above all other yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet.
Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.
The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.
By indignities men come to dignities.
Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.
I hold every man a debtor to his profession.
Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.
They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.
Knowledge is a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.
For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.
Defer not charities till death; for certainly, if a man weigh it rightly, he that doth so is rather liberal of another man’s than of his own.
The more a man drinketh of the world, the more it intoxicateth.
Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously.
Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, “Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone.”
What then remains but that we still should cry, For being born, and, being born, to die?