Quote collection
654 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly"
"The voice of the people has about it something divine: for how otherwise can so many heads agree together as one?"
"Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man's self; and where there is no comparison, no envy."
"A man who contemplates revenge keeps his wounds green."
"I hold every man a debtor to his profession."
"People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbors."
"Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice."
"The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are."
"O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy."
"Discretion in speech is more than eloquence."
"Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools."
"Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be."
"Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn."
"It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one."
"Knowledge is a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."
"The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony."
"It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt."
"...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know"
"Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust."
"Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter."