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.

Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of the truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal for truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives.

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

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

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.