If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
The world is like a vast sea: mankind like a vessel sailing on its tempestuous bosom. ... [T]he sciences serve us for oars.
A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.
I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,--fond of enjoying the present, careless of the future; his conversation that of a man of sense, his actions those of a fool.