“Every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies.”

But love’s a malady without a cure.

We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.

I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.

There is a pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know.

None are so busy as the fool and the knave.

Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.

He who would pry behind the scenes oft sees a counterfeit.

Sure there’s contagion in the tears of friends.

All authors to their own defects are blind.

A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.

All delays are dangerous in war.

Honor is but an empty bubble.

And write whatever Time shall bring to pass With pens of adamant on plates of brass.

He trudged along unknowing what he sought, And whistled as he went, for want of thought.

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d; The next, in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go; To make a third, she join’d the former two.