1
Might not someone jeer at us in the same way, as being afraid, when we have not yet one firm friendship, that we shall without knowing it fall upon an abundance of friends?
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2
A good conscience fears no witnesses, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even of solitude.
3
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget,--but not himself, his own character.
4
In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves.
5
Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.
6
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.