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He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

A cripple in the right way may beat a racer in the wrong one. Nay, the fleeter and better the racer is, who hath once missed his way, the farther he leaveth it behind.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; which proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they rise. For the distance is altered, and it is like a deceit of the eye, that when others come on they think themselves go back.

Love and envy make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.

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

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

A man is but what he knows.

To know truly is to know by causes.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.