Quotes to inspire and reflect

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

What then remains, but that we still should cry,

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s needle [compass] … these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

Nature cannot be ordered about, except by obeying her.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

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.

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business.

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others.

It is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs.

All colours will agree in the dark.

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.’

A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry? ‘A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.’

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

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.

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

Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

It redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves.

A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.