Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.

Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.

There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.

Good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins them.

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature.

Clear and round dealing is the honor of man's nature; and ... mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but embaseth it.

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy, but in passing it over he is superior.

Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.

There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious.

That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come.

A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others.

The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.