Desire of praise disposeth to laudable actions.
Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.
When the nature of the thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a Schoolman.
For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold.
When a man tells me God hath spoken in a dream, I know he dreamt that God spoke to him.
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.
They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance.
Nature itself cannot err.
For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.
It is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles.
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.
Corporations are “worms in the body politic”