“Our vows are heard betimes! and Heaven takes care To grant, before we can conclude the prayer: Preventing angels met it half the way, And sent us back to praise, who came to pray.”

Some of our philosophizing divines have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained that by their force mankind has been able to find out God.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

All heiresses are beautiful.

Old as I am, for ladies’ love unfit, The power of beauty I remember yet.

For your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.

All, as they say, that glitters is not gold.

The conscience of a people is their power.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe, And made her man his paradise forego, Where at heart’s ease he liv’d; and might have been As free from sorrow as he was from sin.

We can never be grieved for their miseries who are thoroughly wicked, and have thereby justly called their calamities on themselves.

Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own.

None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And, from the dregs of life, think to receive, What the first sprightly running could not give.

Pity melts the mind to love.

They think too little who talk too much.

Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries, See the Furies arise!

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