Interesting quotes from: 2/12/2020 - 2/16/2020

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

1. Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction.
2. I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four
friends in the world.
3. The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.
4. I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a
room.
5. We shall die alone.
6. The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
7. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
8. To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

William Walker (1623-1684)

1. Learn to read slow: all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.

John Aubrey (1626-1697)

1. He [Hobbes] had read much, but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He
was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more
than other men.

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

1. My great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way, and rowing another.
2. He that is down, needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride.

Walter Pope (1630-1714)

1. May I govern my passions with absolute sway,
And grow wiser and better, as strength wears away.

John Dryden (1631-1700)

1. The wretched have no friends.
2. Beware the fury of a patient man.
3. Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
4. Doomed to death, though fated not to die.
5. All have not the gift of martyrdom.
6. Possess your soul with patience.
7. Fallen, fallen, fallen fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,
And welt’ring in his blood;
Deserted, at his utmost need,
By those his former bounty fed,
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.
 8. He trudged along unknowing what he sought,
And whistled as he went, for want of thought.
9. Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest, and so am I.

John Locke (1632-1704)

1. Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is
seldom recovered.
2. The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)

1. He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true
and false.
2. Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
3. One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad and indifferent, e.g., music is
good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1633-1685)

1. The multitude is always in the wrong.

George Savile, Marquess of Halifax (1633-1695)

1. Misspending a man’s time is a kind of self-homicide.

Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711)

1. The terrible burden of having nothing to do.

Louis XIV (1638-1715)

1. I am the state.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

1. If I have seen further (than Robert Hooke and Descartes) it is by standing upon the
shoulders of Giants.

William Penn (1644-1718)

1. No Cross, No Crown. [Title]
2. Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its
opposers.
3. Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.
4. Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the nature candle, which is the
reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Jean de La Bruyere (1645-1696)

1. To laugh at men of sense is the privilege of fools.
2. Most men make use of the first part of their life to render the last part miserable.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
1. Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose promise none relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

1. The good die early, and the bad die late.

Matthew Henry (1662-1714)

1. They that die by famine die by inches.

William Walsh (1663-1708)

1. I can endure my own despair,
But not another’s hope.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

1. Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind;
Let all her ways be unconfined;
And clap your padlock—on her mind!
2. And thought the nation ne’er would thrive
Till all the whores were burnt alive.
3. His noble negligences teach
What others’ toils despair to reach.

John Pomfret (1667-1702)

1. We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

1. A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
2. If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to
such a scoundrel.
3. She’s on the wrong side of thirty.

Alain Rene Lesage (1668-1747)

1. It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory.

Edward Young (1683-1765)

1. Be wise with speed;
A fool at forty is a fool indeed.
2. A God all mercy is a God unjust.
3. By night an atheist half believes a God.
4. Like our shadows,
Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
Aaron Hill (1685-1750)
1. Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

1. For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
2. I cannot sleep a wink.
3. Never gallop Pegasus to death.
4. Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
5. When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s
leavings.