The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pas… - Francis Bacon

Despise no new accident in your body, but ask opinion of it… There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man’s observation, what he finds good and of what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.

[I]n the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences; for both the loading of the earth with triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility into nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer. But if it be granted that the earth moves, it would seem more natural to suppose that there is no system at all, but scattered globes (…) than to constitute a system of which the sun is the centre. And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients (…) whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new (…) and was first introduced by Copernicus. (…) But if the earth moves, the stars may either be stationary, as Copernicus thought or, as it is far more probable, and has been suggested by Gilbert, they may revolve each round its own centre in its own place, without any motion of its centre, as the earth itself does (…). But either way, there is no reason why there should not be stars above stars til they go beyond our sight.

Let the eighth motion be the motion of the lesser congregation, by which the homogeneous parts in a body separate themselves from the heterogeneous and combine together; by which also entire bodies from similarity of substance embrace and cherish each other, and sometimes are attracted and collected together from a considerable distance; as when in milk, after it has stood a while, the cream rises to the top, while in wine the dregs sink to the bottom. For this is not caused by the motion of heaviness and lightness only, whereby some parts rise up and some sink down, but much more by a desire of the homogeneous parts to come together and unite in one.