The Essays, Or, Counsels, Civil and Moral: And, The Wisdom of the Ancients

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Little, Brown, 1861 - 360 pages

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Page 23 - Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt. Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair. And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
Page 227 - STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business...
Page 205 - That is the best part of beauty, which a picture cannot express; * no, nor the first sight of the life. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Page 66 - Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God's favour.
Page 50 - One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before.
Page 52 - Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
Page 107 - It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion: for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.
Page 139 - It is good also not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent, or the utility evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation.
Page 145 - We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body, and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
Page 110 - ... creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain : therefore as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.

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