Good Heaven, whose darling attribute we find is boundless grace, and mercy to mankind, abhors the cruel.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd; The next, in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go; To make a third, she join'd the former two.

If you are for a merry jaunt, I will try, for once, who can foot it farthest.

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.

Confidence is the feeling we have before knowing all the facts

Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, But good men starve for want of impudence.