I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.
I’ll give you leave to call me anything, if you don’t call me spade.
Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
Tell truth, and shame the devil.
The more careless, the more modish.
Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
You must take the will for the deed.
Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
Walls have tongues, and hedges ears.
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
I’m up and down and round about, Yet all the world can’t find me out; Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.
Neither is it safe to count upon the weakness of any man’s understanding, who is thoroughly possessed of the spirit of revenge to sharpen his invention.
What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.