Quotes by Robert South

• 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.
• The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.
• Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal 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.
• Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.
• Problems can become opportunities when the right people come together.
• Novelty is the great parent of pleasure.
• Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart.
• 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.
• 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.
• God afflicts with the mind of a father, and kills for no other purpose but that he may raise again.
• Folly enlarges men's desires while it lessens their capacities.
• Defeat should never be a source of discouragement but rather a fresh stimulus.
• Anger is a transient hatred; or at least very like it.
• Abstinence is the great strengthener and clearer of reason.
• 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.
• An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.