Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin.

By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men's minds of him.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone?... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour.

They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.