Robert Burton

A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better.

Idleness is an appendix to nobility.

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

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.

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

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 …

Can build castles in the air.

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

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

Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.

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

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.

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

Women wear the breeches.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

Rob Peter, and pay Paul.

Him that makes shoes go barefoot himself.

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

Like the watermen that row one way and look another.

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.

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

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

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

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