Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them.

I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.

Books are a languid pleasure.

.. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness.