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.

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

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.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

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.