Quotessence
Home / Authors / John Aubrey
John Aubrey

John Aubrey Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllMenFatherHarveyOxfordAnonBoxesCountyGentlemanHappenedHas Beens

Famous John Aubrey Quotes

“There is to some men a great Lechery in Lying, and imposing on the understandings of beleeving people.”

PeopleMenLyingUnderstandingImposingLechery
Book:Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: to which are Added, Hearne's Journeys to Reading, and to Whaddon Hall, the Seat of Browne Willis, Esq., and Lives of Eminent Men, by John Aubrey, Esq: The Whole Now First Published from the Originals in the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with Biographical and Literary Illustrations ...
Create image

“Mr Hooke sent, in his next letter [to Sir Isaac Newton] the whole of his Hypothesis, scil that the gravitation was reciprocall to the square of the distance: ... This is the greatest Discovery in Nature that ever was since the World's Creation. It was never so much as hinted by any man before. I wish he had writt plainer, and afforded a little more paper.”

MenWorldLittlesWholeScienceNextWishCreationTheoryPaperDiscoveryLettersDistanceSquaresHypothesisNewtonIsaacGravitation
Author:John Aubrey
Create image

“About Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.”

LoveYearsMadeTruthLastsImpossibleHappenedElementsLaysLibraryConvincedGentlemanPropositionsDemonstrationGeometryTheoremsHobbesEuclidMathematical Proof
Author:John Aubrey
Create image

“Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style and make a speech. Ben Jonson and he did gather humors of men daily wherever they came.”

MenHas BeensFatherBornBoysStyleExerciseSpeechTradeNeighborCountyButchersCalvesAvon
Author:John Aubrey
Create image

“How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe!”

Would BeCuriosityIdle
Book:Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: to which are Added, Hearne's Journeys to Reading, and to Whaddon Hall, the Seat of Browne Willis, Esq., and Lives of Eminent Men, by John Aubrey, Esq: The Whole Now First Published from the Originals in the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum, with Biographical and Literary Illustrations ...
Create image