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.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.

Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.