The essays, or Counsels, civil & moral, with a table of the colours of good and evil. Whereunto is added The wisdome of the ancients, enlarged by the author

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Page 95 - But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Page 183 - ... studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them: for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation.
Page 184 - 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 subtle, natural philosophy deep, moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend,
Page 212 - In the youth of a state, arms do flourish : in the middle age of a state, learning; and then both of them together for a time : in the declining age of a state, mechanical arts and merchandize.
Page 116 - But thus much is certain; that he that commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the war as he will; whereas those that be strongest by land are many times nevertheless in great straits.
Page 62 - It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an Opinion as is unworthy of him : for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely : and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity. Plutarch saith well to that purpose :
Page 159 - ... faces to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody but the painter that made them. Not but I think a painter may make a better face than ever was ; but he must do it by a kind of felicity (as a musician that maketh an excellent air in music) and not by rule.
Page 6 - 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...
Page 46 - If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
Page 184 - Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things.

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