Wounds cannot be cured without searching.

Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike.

Mysteries are due to secrecy.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth . . . and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.