"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."

"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do …"

"Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes."

"For the sense is a thing infirm and erring, and the mind is a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance."

"Certainly, wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity."