The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it; and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything, to proclaim its defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how much to be coveted soever.

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.

Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.

Fortune, to show us her power in all things, and to abate our presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them fortunate.

There is not one of us that would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with a sort of vermin called flatterers.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.