My thoughts ran a wool-gathering.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

Man have to have friends even in hell.

Poesy is a beauteous damsel, chaste, honourable, discreet, witty, retired, and who keeps herself within the limits of propriety. She is a friend of solitude; fountains entertain her, meadows console her, woods free her from ennui, flowers delight her; in short, she gives pleasure and instruction to all with whom she communicates.

Does the devil possess you? You're leaping over the hedge before you come at the stile.

I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.

Experience is the universal mother of sciences.