The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

The Idols of Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.

That which above all other yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet.

For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.

Reading maketh a full man.