Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

There is a cunning which we in England call the rning of the cat in the pan.

Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs: for occasions have their revolutions, and what has once been advantageously used may be so again, either as an old thing or a new one.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

There is no secrecy comparable to celerity.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy.