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The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

We see spiders, flies or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

It was prettily devised of Aesop: The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot-wheel, and said, What a dust do I raise!

We see how flies, and spiders, and the like, get a sepulchre in amber, more durable than the monument and embalming of the body of any king.

The folly of one man is the fortune of another.

That conceit, elegantly expressed by the Emperor Charles V., in his instructions to the King, his son, "that fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman, that if she be too much wooed she is the farther off."

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune: for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, his is a base and ignoble creature.

Because indeed there was never law, or sect, or opinion, did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

States are great engines moving slowly.

So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top.

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Nothing is terrible except fear itself.

If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.