Bacon's Essays and Wisdom of the Ancients

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Little, Brown,, 1884 - 425 pages
 

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Page 27 - 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 267 - ... of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.
Page 267 - Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Page 58 - 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. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the lovemaking or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Page 65 - And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.
Page 60 - 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 240 - There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell whether Apelles or Albert Durer were the more trifler; whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent.
Page 203 - It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant, and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation ; for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy and do mischief and spend victuals and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their country to the discredit of the plantation.
Page 62 - Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark ; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious ; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes a mixture of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in some of the friars...
Page 61 - ... it ; for these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious.

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