It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
It is a wise mans part, rather to avoid sickness, than to wish for medicines.
What is deferred is not avoided.
Nobody owns anything but everyone is rich – for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?
What though youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine.
The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.
They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.
For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.
We cannot go to heaven in featherbeds.
The times are never so bad but that a good man can make shift to live in them.
It’s a poor doctor who can’t cure one disease without giving you another.
The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.
Oh! blame not the bard.
He travels best that knows when to return.
I should only ever tell the king what he ought to do, not what he could do. For if the lion knows his own strength, no man could control him.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.
Whoever loveth me, loveth my hound.
Every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.
Howbeit, this one thing, son, I assure you on my faith, that if the parties will at hands call for justice, then, all were it my father stood on the one side, and the devil on the other, his cause being good, the devil should have right.
Food is an implement of magic, and only the most coldhearted rationalist could squeeze the juices of life out of it and make it bland. In a true sense, a cookbook is the best source of psychological advice and the kitchen the first choice of room for a therapy of the world.