The brain, having never taken a course in philosophy, is the ultimate pragmatist; what is true is what works. Like any successful oddsmaker, the brain is a predictor of probabilities, not a stickler for the perfect answer.
Our mental limitations prevent us from accepting our mental limitations.
One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.
Naught so sweet as melancholy.
Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.
Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him, all his life long.
Temperance is a bridle of gold; he, who uses it rightly, is more like a god than a man.
Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.
Employment, which Galen calls ‘Nature’s Physician,’ is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
Out of too much learning become mad.
Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers end.
He is only fantastical that is not in fashion.
A quiet mind cureth all.
It is most true, stylus virum arguit, – our style betrays us.
They are proud in humility, proud that they are not proud.
Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all, the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity.
Seneca thinks the gods are well pleased when they see great men contending with adversity.
Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies.
Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.