Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand -- and melting like a snowflake.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend.

There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.

The sun, though it passes through dirty places, yet remains as pure as before.

They who derive their worth from their ancestors resemble potatoes, the most valuable part of which is underground.

REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

The way of fortune is like the milky way in the sky; which is a meeting, or knot, of a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together : so are there a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Books will speak plain when counselors blanch.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.

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

Of all things known to mortals, wine is the most powerful and effectual for exciting and inflaming the passions of mankind, being common fuel to them all.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

To choose time, is to save time.