Parents who wish to train up their children in the way they should go must go in the way in which they would have their children go.
The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.
Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.
The remedy is worse than the disease.
Rebellions of the belly are the worst.
Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.
There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.