The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces
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indeed, rather, could not subsist at all: CURIS ACCUUNT MORTALIA
CORDA.
Praise is the daughter of present power.
How inconsistent is man with himself!
I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public
affairs and counsels governed by foolish servants.
I have known great Ministers, distinguished for wit and learning,
who preferred none but dunces.
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The Battle of the Books and
Other Short Pieces
I have known men of great valour cowards to their wives.
I have known men of the greatest cunning perpetually cheated.
I knew three great Ministers, who could exactly compute and settle
the accounts of a kingdom, but were wholly ignorant of their own
economy.
The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the
course of virtue, but seldom or never reclaims the vicious.
Princes usually make wiser choices than the servants whom they
trust for the disposal of places: I have known a prince, more than
once, choose an able Minister, but I never observed that Minister
to use his credit in the disposal of an employment to a person whom
he thought the fittest for it. One of the greatest in this age
owned and excused the matter from the violence of parties and the
unreasonableness of friends.
Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones
are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a
straw.
Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary
to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are
otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.
Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.
Love of flattery in most men proceeds from the mean opinion they
have of themselves; in women from the contrary.
If books and laws continue to increase as they have done for fifty
years past, I am in some concern for future ages how any man will
be learned, or any man a lawyer.
Kings are commonly said to have LONG HANDS; I wish they had as LONG
EARS.
Princes in their infancy, childhood, and youth are said to discover
prodigious parts and wit, to speak things that surprise and
astonish. Strange, so many hopeful princes, and so many shameful
kings! If they happen to die young, they would have been prodigies
of wisdom and virtue. If they live, they are often prodigies
indeed, but of another sort.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but
corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good
ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
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The Battle of the Books and
Other Short Pieces
Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of diseases. Both
wore originally the same trade, and still continue.
Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their
long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
A person was asked at court, what he thought of an ambassador and
his train, who were all embroidery and lace, full of bows, cringes,
and gestures; he said, it was Solomon's importation, gold and apes.
Most sorts of diversion in men, children, and other animals, is an
imitation of fighting.
Augustus meeting an ass with a lucky name foretold himself good
fortune. I meet many asses, but none of them have lucky names.
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is he keeps his at
the same time.
Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of truth when we see
them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of
their zeal to truth, although they contradict themselves every day
of their lives?
That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage in an
author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there
I pronounce him to be mistaken.
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing
to live another time.
Laws penned with the utmost care and exactness, and in the vulgar
language, are often perverted to wrong meanings; then why should we
wonder that the Bible is so?
Although men are accused for not knowing their weakness, yet
perhaps as few know their own strength.
A man seeing a wasp creeping into a vial filled with honey, that
was hung on a fruit tree, said thus: "Why, thou sottish animal,
art thou mad to go into that vial, where you see many hundred of
your kind there dying in it before you?" "The reproach is just,"
answered the wasp, "but not from you men, who are so far from
taking example by other people's follies, that you will not take
warning by your own. If after falling several times into this
vial, and escaping by chance, I should fall in again, I should then
but resemble you."
An old miser kept a tame jackdaw, that used to steal pieces of
money, and hide them in a hole, which the cat observing, asked why
he would hoard up those round shining things that he could make no
use of? "Why," said the jackdaw, "my master has a whole chest
full, and makes no more use of them than I."
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The Battle of the Books and
Other Short Pieces
Men are content to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their
folly.
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in
their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know
that they ever had any.
After all the maxims and systems of trade and commerce, a standerby
would think the affairs of the world were most ridiculously
contrived.
There are few countries which, if well cultivated, would not
support double the number of their inhabitants, and yet fewer where
one-third of the people are not extremely stinted even in the
necessaries of life. I send out twenty barrels of corn, which
would maintain a family in bread for a year, and I bring back in
return a vessel of wine, which half a dozen good follows would
drink in less than a month, at the expense of their health and
reason.
A man would have but few spectators, if he offered to show for
threepence how he could thrust a red-hot iron into a barrel of
gunpowder, and it should not take fire.
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