I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

You can't be more horrific than life itself.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Great changes are easier than small ones.

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.