When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no proof!

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth.

Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.