Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.

Flying would give such occasions for intrigues as people cannot meet with who have nothing but legs to carry them.

Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.

Content thyself to be obscurely good.

Were a man's sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

Our friends don't see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.