It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.
The water which rises in the mountain is the blood which keeps the mountain in life.
Not to anticipate is already to moan.
Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.
Just as iron rusts from disuse, and stagnant water putrefies, or when cold turns to ice, so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.
The lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things, it would take off something from God’s grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.
A day will come in which men will look upon an animal’s murder the same way they look today upon a man’s murder.
The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.
If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.
Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.
Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ.
He who never puts his trust in any man will never be deceived.
Nature alone is the master of true genius.
Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.
A man of supreme folly: his life flies away while he is merely hoping to enjoy it.
Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.
Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.
Among the great things which are to be found among us, the being of nothingness is the greatest.
Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us.
The natural desire of good men is knowledge.