Quote collection
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"I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either."
"I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade."
"Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years."
"If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels."
"Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness."
"Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to."
"A fig for your bill of fare; show me your bill of company."
"Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors."
"Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship."
"Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man."
"If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches."
"There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it; the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second."
"Big-endians and small-endians."
"111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best."
"Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies."
"My Lawyer being practiced almost from his Cradle in defending Falsehood; is quite out of his Element when he would be an Advocate for Justice, which as an Office unnatural, he always attempts with great Awkwardness if not with Ill-will."
"An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart"
"For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men."
"Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse."
"A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds."