I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.

It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.

There are as many and innumerable degrees of wit, as there are cubits between this and heaven.

We took advantage of [the Indians'] ignorance and inexperience to incline them the more easily toward treachery, lewdness, avarice, and every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our ways.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

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