Prayer should be short, without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this or that; He knows best wheat is good for us. If your boy should ask you for a suit of clothes and give you reasons, would you endure it? You know his needs better than he; let him ask for a suit of clothes.

To preach long, loud, and Damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us, and we run after him again to save us.

I have taken much pains to know everything that is esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my reading, nothing now remains to comfort me at the close of this life but this passage of St. Paul: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." To this I cleave, and herein do I find rest.

The Hall was the place where the great lord used to eat . . . He ate not in private, except in time of sickness . . . Nay, the king himself used to eat in the Hall, and his lords sat with him, and he understood men.

The clergy would have us believe them against our own reason, as the woman would have her husband against his own eyes.

Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.

Money makes a man laugh.