There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady's head-dress.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: 'What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.'

Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news. If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.

Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.