All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.

Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.

If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.

Of governments there are said to be only two forms - democracy and oligarchy. For aristocracy is considered to be a kind of oligarchy, as being the rule of a few, and the so-called constitutional government to be really a democracy.