When Shakespeare copied chroniclers verbatim, it was because he knew they were good enough for his audiences. In a more polished age he who could so move our passions, could surely have performed the easier task of satisfying our taste.
Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.
Lord Bath used to say of women, who are apt to say that they will follow their own judgment, that they could not follow a worse guide.
The contempt of money is no more a virtue than to wash one’s hand is one; but one does not willingly shake hands with a man that never washes his.
Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.
I have known men of valor cowards to their wives.
I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted.
Had I children, my utmost endeavors would be to make them musicians.
Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
A bystander often sees more of the game than those that play.
I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one.
The farther I travel, the less I wonder at anything: a few days reconcile one to a new spot, or an unseen custom; and men are so much the same everywhere, that one scare perceives a change in situation.
Heaven mocks the short-sighted views of man.
I hold visions to be wisdom, and would deny them only to ambition, which exists only by the destruction of visions of everybody else.
This life is but a pilgrimage.
This is a bad world; nor have I had cause to leave it with regret.
The most remarkable thing I have observed since I came abroad, is, that there are no people so obviously mad as the English.
My veracity is dearer to me than my life,” said the peasant; “nor would I purchase the one by forfeiting the other.
There is nothing I hold so cheap as a learned man, except an unlearned one .
My soul abhors a falsehood.