The 17th-century churchman Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) had a gift for pithy maxims:

• Every horse thinks its own pack heaviest.
• There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved.
• He that has a great nose, thinks everybody is speaking of it.
• It is more difficult to praise rightly than to blame.
• Eaten bread is forgotten.
• A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools.
• Bad excuses are worse than none.
• A book that is shut is but a block.
• Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools.
• A man is not good or bad for one action.
• Unseasonable kindness gets no thanks.
• ‘Tis skill, not strength, that governs a ship.
• Abused patience turns to fury.
• All things are difficult before they are easy.
• Poor men’s reasons are not heard.
• The more wit the less courage.
• Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

And “Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.” “Wit,” wrote Coleridge, “was the stuff and substance of Fuller’s intellect.”