In a letter to a friend the thought is often unimportant, and the feeling, if it be only a desire to entertain him, every thing.

[It is a basic principle of a tyrant] to unarm his people of weapons, money and all means whereby they resist his power.

But true love is a durable fire, In the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

It is the nature of men having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.

According to Solomon, life and death are in the power of the tongue; and as Euripides truly affirmeth, every unbridled tongue in the end shall find itself unfortunate; for in all that ever I observed in the course of worldly things, I ever found that men's fortunes are oftener made by their tongues than by their virtues, and more men's fortunes overthrown thereby, also, than by their vices.

Talking much is a sign of vanity, for the one who is lavish with words is cheap in deeds.

The first draught serveth for health, the second for pleasure, the third for shame, the fourth for madness.