No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure escape; brick-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes: what king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? [ William Shakespeare ]

Never build after you are five and forty; have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate. [ Kett ]

Be not too rash in the breaking of an inconvenient custom; as it was gotten, so leave it by degrees. Danger attends upon too sudden alterations; he that pulls down a bad building by the great may be ruined by the fall, but he that takes it down brick by brick may live to build a better. [ Quarles ]

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. [ Barry Cornwall ]