I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company.
Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one’s tongue don’t move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.
The passions seldom give good advice but to the interested and mercenary. Resentment generally suggests bad measures. Second thoughts and good nature will rarely, very rarely, approve the first hints of anger.
How posterity will laugh at us, one way or other! If half a dozen break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.
The best philosophy is to do one’s duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one’s lot; bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it.
Letters to absence can a voice impart, And lend a tongue when distance gags the heart.
Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
We often repent of our first thoughts, and scarce ever of our second.
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.