The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body and reduce it to harmony.
Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
Wonder is the seed of knowledge.
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Great changes are easier than small ones.
Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
God’s first creature, which was light.
Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.
If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.
The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.