“A good poet’s made as well as born.”

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick

True melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit.

If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man.

I would rather have a plain down-right wisdom than a foolish and affected eloquence.

The Devil is an Ass , I do acknowledge it.

That old bald cheater, Time.

He that is respectless in his courses oft sells his reputation at cheap market.

Forbear, you things That stand upon the pinnacles of state, To boast your slippery height! when you do fall, You dash yourselves in pieces, ne’er to rise: And he that lends you pity, is not wise.

Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, a pernicious evil, the darkener of man’s life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth.

It is less dishonor to hear imperfectly than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused; the understanding is not.

Truth is man’s proper good, and the only immortal thing was given to our mortality to use.

If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

A good man will avoid the spot of any sin. The very aspersion is grievous, which makes him choose his way in his life, as he would in his journey.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.

I was a basket case, you know? When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren’t going well.

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

I always knew ‘My Dawg’ would be a hit, but I didn’t even know what a hit was. When I made the song I knew it sounded hard.

The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith’s ‘What It Was, Was Football.’ I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn’t know what any of it meant.

The first project, I made 16 songs and put 12 of them on the mixtape.

Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.