Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Our mental limitations prevent us from accepting our mental limitations.

Properly conducted scientific studies . . . give us a pretty good idea of when something is likely to be correct. To me, pretty good is a linguistic statistic that falls somewhere in between more likely than not and beyond a reasonable doubt, et avoides the pitfalls arising from the belief in complete objectivity.

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

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

Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies.

Out of too much learning become mad.

Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all, the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity.

It is most true, stylus virum arguit, - our style betrays us.

Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.

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

Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers end.