The Essays: Or, Counsels, Civil and Moral ; and The Wisdom of the Ancients

Front Cover
Little, Brown, 1856 - English essays - 360 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 23 - Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt. Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair. And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Page 227 - STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring ; for ornament, is in discourse ; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business ; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars one by one ; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.
Page 205 - That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express; * no, nor the first sight of the life. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Page 31 - The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things ' ; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
Page 55 - It is as natural to die as to be born, and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt' and therefore, a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolours of death. But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis, when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations.
Page 228 - Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Page 66 - Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God's favour.
Page 50 - One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before.
Page 52 - Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
Page 138 - Surely every medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator ; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end...

Bibliographic information