Essays, Civil and Moral and the New Atlantis

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P F Collier & Son Company, 1909 - 332 pages

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Page 8 - ... the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it ; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it; is the sovereign good of human nature.
Page 202 - I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Page 222 - Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governors : a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.
Page 221 - Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as...
Page 227 - And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple ; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter ? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
Page 122 - To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
Page 19 - The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion ; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.
Page 202 - ... our sage and serious poet Spenser, (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,) describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain.
Page 46 - There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received ; therefore care would be had that (as it fareth in ill purgings) the good be not taken away with the bad, which commonly is done when the people is the reformer. XVIII. Of Travel TRAVEL, in the younger sort, is a part of education ; in the elder, a part of experience.
Page 105 - Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold ; stir more than they can quiet ; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees ; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly...

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