The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

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.

Innovations, which are the births of time.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, "Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone."