I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.

All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.

Patience alleviates, as impatience augments, pain; thus persons of strong will suffer less than those who give way to irritation.

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.

When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.