When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.

Inquiries into the heart are not for man.

Governors being accustomed to hear of more crimes than they can punish, and more wrongs than they can redress, set themselves at ease by indiscriminate negligence, and presently forget the request when they lose sight of the petitioner.