Robert Burton

"Homer himself must beg if he want means, and as by report sometimes he did "go from door to door and sing ballads, with a company of boys about him.""

"See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all."

"They are proud in humility; proud that they are not proud."

"Hinc quam sic calamus sævior ense, patet. The pen worse than the sword."

"We can make majors and officers every year, but not scholars."

"All my joys to this are folly Naught so sweet as melancholy."

"The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, all the world else is blinde."

"I had a heavy heart and an ugly head, a kind of impostume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of."

"I would help others, out of a fellow-feeling."

"They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works."

"We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets steal from Homer... Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best."

"I say with Didacus Stella, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself."

"Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses."

"It is most true, stylus virum arguit,—our style bewrays us."

"I had not time to lick it into form, as a bear doth her young ones."

"As that great captain, Ziska, would have a drum made of his skin when he was dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his enemies to flight."

"Like the watermen that row one way and look another."

"Smile with an intent to do mischief, or cozen him whom he salutes."

"Him that makes shoes go barefoot himself."

"Rob Peter, and pay Paul."

"Penny wise, pound foolish."

"Women wear the breeches."

"Like Aesop's fox, when he had lost his tail, would have all his fellow foxes cut off theirs."

"Our wrangling lawyers... are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients' causes hereafter,—some of them in hell."

"Hannibal, as he had mighty virtues, so had he many vices; he had two distinct persons in him."

"All poets are mad."

"Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer."

"Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular, all his life long."

"[Witches] steal young children out of their cradles, ministerio dæmonum, and put deformed in their rooms, which we call changelings."

"Can build castles in the air."

"Joh. Mayor, in the first book of his "History of Scotland," contends much for the wholesomeness of oaten bread; it was objected to him, then living at Paris, that his countrymen fed on oats and base grain…. And yet Wecker out of Galen calls it horse-meat, and fitter juments than men to feed on."

"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen."

"As much valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and carpet knights will make this good, and prove it."

"No rule is so general, which admits not some exception."

"Idleness is an appendix to nobility."

"Why doth one man's yawning make another yawn?"

"A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better."

"Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse; envy alone wants both. Other sins last but for awhile; the gut may be satisfied, anger remits, hatred hath an end, envy never ceaseth."

"They do not live but linger."

"[Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies."

"[Desire] is a perpetual rack, or horsemill, according to Austin, still going round as in a ring."

"[Ambitious men] may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain, so Budaeus compares them; they climb and climb still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top."

"[The rich] are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors."

"Like a hog, or dog in the manger, he doth only keep it because it shall do nobody else good, hurting himself and others."

"Were it not that they are loath to lay out money on a rope, they would be hanged forthwith, and sometimes die to save charges."

"A mere madness, to live like a wretch and die rich."

"I may not here omit those two main plagues and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of people; they go commonly together."

"All our geese are swans."

"Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriæ, yet as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books."

"One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague."