“And one wild Shakespeare, following Nature’s lights, Is worth whole planets, filled with Stagyrites.”

The times are never so bad but that a good man can make shift to live in them.

Lord, give me a sense of humor so that I may take some happiness from this life and share it with others.

It’s wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else’s enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose.

Who does more earnestly long for a change than he who is uneasy in his present circumstances? And who run to create confusions with so desperate a boldness as those who have nothing to lose, hope to gain by them?

Lawyers-a profession it is to disguise matters.

For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.

The increasing influence of the Bible is marvelously great, penetrating everywhere. It carries with it a tremendous power of freedom and justice guided by a combined force of wisdom and goodness.

And peradventure we have more cause to thank Him for our loss than for our winning; for His wisdom better seeth what is good for us than we do ourselves.

Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.

The things we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labor for.

As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language.

The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.

Getting married is like putting one’s hand in a bag containing 99 serpents and one eel.

No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want – or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you’re better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.

Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.

To gold and silver nature hath given no use that we may not well lack.