“All objects lose by too familiar a view.”

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.

It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, can rule nothing, but is ruled by prudence.

Tis a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.

Riches cannot rescue from the grave, which claims alike the monarch and the slave.

For they can conquer who believe they can.

They say everything in the world is good for something.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Sure there is none but fears a future state; And when the most obdurate swear they do not, Their trembling hearts belie their boasting tongues.

Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

Welcome, thou kind deceiver! Thou best of thieves; who, with an easy key, Dost open life, and, unperceived by us, Even steal us from ourselves.

We all had to learn how to do it. So it’s just something creative people need to get familiar with… not really so scary.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define WHAT we are and discover WHO we are.

I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

I saw this French woman, this English man in Italy. It was a film [Certified Copy] I knew well, but I had already seen it, and I was familiar with it, and I had no feeling of anxiety or responsibility toward it.