At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra.
To act with common sense according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know.
It is charming to totter into vogue.
A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.
Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.
Lawyers and rogues are vermin not easily rooted out of a rich soil.
Perhaps those, who, trembling most, maintain a dignity in their fate, are the bravest: resolution on reflection is real courage.
A man of sense, though born without wit, often lives to have wit. His memory treasures up ideas and reflections; he compares themwith new occurrences, and strikes out new lights from the collision. The consequence is sometimes bons mots, and sometimes apothegms.
The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal, and I am determined never to reckon upon any other.
Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.
Our supreme governors, the mob.
Fashion is fortunately no law but to its devotees.
Fashion is always silly, for, before it can spread far, it must be calculated for silly people; as examples of sense, wit, or ingenuity could be imitated only by a few.
Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.
A careless song, with a little nonsense in it now and then, does not mis-become a monarch.
Mystery is the wisdom of blockheads.
It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink.
Men are often capable of greater things than they perform – They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.
I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.
How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.