A few books, well studied, and thoroughly digested, nourish the understanding more than hundreds but gargled in the mouth, as ordinary students use.

When you speak to any, especially of quality, look them full in the face; other gestures betraying want of breeding, confidence, or honesty; dejected eyes confessing, to most judgments, guilt or folly.

Covetousness, like a candle ill made, smothers the splendor of a happy fortune in its own grease.

The ordinary saying is, Count money after your father; so the same prudence adviseth to measure the ends of all counsels, though uttered by never so intimate a friend.

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eye's to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

Such as are betrayed by their easy nature to be ordinary security for their friends leave so little to themselves, as their liberty remains ever after arbitrary at the will of others; experience having recorded many, whom their fathers had left elbowroom enough, that by suretyship have expired in a dungeon.

It is an aphorism in physic, that unwholesome airs, because perpetually sucked into the lungs, do distemper health more than coarser diet used but at set times. The like may be said of society, which, if good, is a better refiner of the spirits than ordinary books.