You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.

When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Don't set your wit against a child.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.