Robert South

Novelty is the great parent of pleasure.

God afflicts with the mind of a father, and kills for no other purpose but that he may raise again.

God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.

The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

Problems can become opportunities when the right people come together.

Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.

Let a man be but in earnest in praying against a temptation as the tempter is in pressing it, and he needs not proceed by a surer measure.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice and falsehood passing from words into things.

In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness he finds not half the pleasure in the possession that he proposed to himself in the expectation.

Anger is a transient hatred; or at least very like it.

The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.

It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination.

Problems can become opportunities when the right people come together

Abstinence is the great strengthener and clearer of reason.

Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart.

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

An obstacle is often an unrecognized opportunity.

The vulgar and the many are fit only to be led or driven.

Folly enlarges men's desires while it lessens their capacities.