While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
Time conquers all, and we must time obey.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare; And beauty draws us with a single hair.
False happiness is like false money; it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and alloy, and feel the loss.
Two purposes in human nature rule. Self- love to urge, and reason to restrain.
Old men, for the most part, are like old chronicles that give you dull but true accounts of times past, and are worth knowing only on that score.
Some praise at morning what they blame at night, but always think the last opinion right.
Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it, If folly grow romantic, I must paint it.
Wit in conversation is only a readiness of thought and a facility of expression, or a quick conception and an easy delivery.
Astrologers that future fates foreshow.
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see.
The only time you run out of chances is when you stop taking them.
All looks yellow to a jaundiced eye.
Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.
A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.
A disputant no more cares for the truth than the sportsman for the hare.
A brave man thinks no one his superior who does him an injury, for he has it then in his power to make himself superior to the other by forgiving it.
What’s fame? a fancy’d life in other’s breath. A thing beyond us, even before our death.
Atheists put on false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear.
The scripture in times of disputes is like an open town in times of war, which serves in differently the occasions of both parties.