Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.

Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.

But satire, ever moral, ever new, Delights the reader and instructs him, too. She, if good sense refine her sterling page, Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.

It is in vain a daring author thinks of attaining to the heights of Parnassus if he does not feel the secret influence of heaven and if his natal star has not formed him to be a poet.

Happy who in his verse can gently steer, From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.

The world is full of fools; and he who would not wish to see one, must not only shut himself up alone, but must also break his looking-glass.

It is the sin which we have not committed which seems the most monstrous.