Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

Fortune favours the bold.

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited.

No one chooses what does not rest with himself, but only what he thinks can be attained by his own act.