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.

Books, the children of the brain.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.

I row after health like a waterman.

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.

So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less.