For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.

People prefer to believe what they want to be true.

Whatever you can, count.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

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.

I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.