Essays by Lords Bacon and Clarendon: Two Volumes in One, Volumes 1-2

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Wells and Lilly, Court-Street, 1820 - English essays - 539 pages
 

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Page 125 - But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.
Page 118 - 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 18 - It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death ; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death ; love slights it ; honour aspireth to it ; grief flieth to it ; fear preoccupateth it...
Page 62 - But now I have' written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.
Page 13 - WHAT is truth ?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients.
Page 85 - For take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God, or melior natura, which courage is manifestly such as that 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 favor, gathereth a force and faith which human nature in itself could not obtain.
Page 15 - The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his sabbath work, ever since, is the illumination of his Spirit.
Page 201 - DEFORMED persons are commonly even with nature ; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part, as the Scripture saith, void of natural affection: and so they have their revenge of nature.
Page 14 - One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love lies : where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets; nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake.
Page 126 - ... 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.

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