Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.
There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.
Books, the children of the brain.
What some people invent the rest enlarge.
The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.