I knew three great Ministers, who could exactly compute and settle the
accounts of a kingdom, but were wholly ignorant of their own economy.
The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the
course of virtue, but seldom or never reclaims the vicious.
Princes usually make wiser choices than the servants whom they trust for
the disposal of places: I have known a prince, more than once, choose an
able Minister, but I never observed that Minister to use his credit in
the disposal of an employment to a person whom he thought the fittest for
it. One of the greatest in this age owned and excused the matter from
the violence of parties and the unreasonableness of friends.
Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not
in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old
men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too
apt to insult them upon the score of their age.
Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.
Love of flattery in most men proceeds from the mean opinion they have of
themselves; in women from the contrary.
If books and laws continue to increase as they have done for fifty years
past, I am in some concern for future ages how any man will be learned,
or any man a lawyer.
Kings are commonly said to have _long hands_; I wish they had as _long
ears_.
Princes in their infancy, childhood, and youth are said to discover
prodigious parts and wit, to speak things that surprise and astonish.
Strange, so many hopeful princes, and so many shameful kings! If they
happen to die young, they would have been prodigies of wisdom and virtue.
If they live, they are often prodigies indeed, but of another sort.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but
corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good
ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of diseases. Both were
originally the same trade, and still continue.
Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long
beards, and pretences to foretell events.
A person was asked at court, what he thought of an ambassador and his
train, who were all embroidery and lace, full of bows, cringes, and
gestures; he said, it was Solomon's importation, gold and apes.
Most sorts of diversion in men, children, and other animals, is an
imitation of fighting.
Augustus meeting an ass with a lucky name foretold himself good fortune.
I meet many asses, but none of them have lucky names.
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is he keeps his at the
same time.
Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of truth when we see them so
positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal to
truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives?
That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage in an author,
where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce
him to be mistaken.
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to
live another time.
Laws penned with the utmost care and exactness, and in the vulgar
language, are often perverted to wrong meanings; then why should we
wonder that the Bible is so?
Although men are accused for not knowing their weakness, yet perhaps as
few know their own strength.
A man seeing a wasp creeping into a vial filled with honey, that was hung
on a fruit tree, said thus: "Why, thou sottish animal, art thou mad to go
into that vial, where you see many hundred of your kind there dying in it
before you?" "The reproach is just," answered the wasp, "but not from
you men, who are so far from taking example by other people's follies,
that you will not take warning by your own. If after falling several
times into this vial, and escaping by chance, I should fall in again, I
should then but resemble you."
An old miser kept a tame jackdaw, that used to steal pieces of money, and
hide them in a hole, which the cat observing, asked why he would hoard up
those round shining things that he could make no use of? "Why," said the
jackdaw, "my master has a whole chest full, and makes no more use of them
than I."
Men are content to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly.
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their
works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they
ever had any.
After all the maxims and systems of trade and commerce, a stander-by
would think the affairs of the world were most ridiculously contrived.
There are few countries which, if well cultivated, would not support
double the number of their inhabitants, and yet fewer where one-third of
the people are not extremely stinted even in the necessaries of life. I
send out twenty barrels of corn, which would maintain a family in bread
for a year, and I bring back in return a vessel of wine, which half a
dozen good follows would drink in less than a month, at the expense of
their health and reason.
A man would have but few spectators, if he offered to show for threepence
how he could thrust a red-hot iron into a barrel of gunpowder, and it
should not take fire.