When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.
When you set about your ...
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Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.