Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.

He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that 'no book [etc] was so bad but some good might be got out of it'.

Too much polishing weakens rather than improves a work.

Honor puts us under an obligation as binding as necessity is for other people.

They enhance the value of their favors by the words with which they are accompanied.

Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.