Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Acorns were good until bread was found.
Silence is the virtue of fools.
It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.
We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
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.
Great changes are easier than small ones.