If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.
I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.
Lukewarm persons think they may accommodate points of religion by middle ways and witty reconcilements, – as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man.
Friendship redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
Do not wonder if the common people speak more truly than those above them: they speak more safely.
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
Certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
Knowledge hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and therefore where it entereth into a man it makes him swell.
He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith.
Great Hypocrites are the real atheists.
When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.
It cannot be denied that outward accidents conduce much to fortune, favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion fitting virtue; but chiefly, the mold of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.
A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.
We must see whether the same clock with weights will go faster at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; it is probable, if the pull of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine, that the earth has real attraction.
He that cometh to seek after knowledge, with a mind to scorn, shall be sure to find matter for his humour, but no matter for his instruction.
The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
And as for Mixed Mathematics, I may only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed.
Life is a marshmallow, easy to chew but hard to swallow.