An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.