Amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.

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.

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.

I would rather be old for a shorter time than be old before my time.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.