Study prophecies when they are become histories.

... indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the colossuses and majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematieks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker.

To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our belief.

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.

I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof, 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures.

I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.