Time is the greatest innovator.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

Religion brought forth riches, and the daughter devoured the mother.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so