Persons of mean understandings, not so inquisitive, nor so well instructed, are made good Christians, and by reverence and obedience, implicity believe, and abide by their belief.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

Nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired object.

There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.

We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base