Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

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.

Journeys at youth are part of the education; but at maturity, are part of the experience.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top.