There’s no taking trout with dry breeches.

By the street of By and By, one arrives at the house of Never

I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be...

Patience and shuffle the cards.

Oh, sir, sir, there are more tricks done in the village than make a noise – saving her ladyship’s presence.

Don’t put too fine a point to your wit for fear it should get blunted.

El ver mucho y leer mucho aviva los ingenios de los hombres.

‘ Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o...

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes.

Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers others virgins – namely, all the other sciences – make it their business to enrich, polish and...

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?

The worst reconciliation is better than the best divorce

You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.

Earned with the sweat of my brows.

History is a sacred kind of writing, because truth is essential to it, and where truth is, there God himself is, so far as truth is concerned

Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

Tis an old saying, the Devil lurks behind the cross. All is not gold that glitters. From the tail of the plough, Bamba was made King of Spain; and from his silks and riches was...

He has an oar in every man’s boat and a finger in every pie

I know who I am, and I know too that I am capable of being not only the characters I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France, and all the Nine Worthies as...

It is not the hand, but the understanding of a man, that may be said to write

There is no book so bad, said the bachelor, but something good may be found in it.

No padlocks, bolts, or bars can secure a maiden better than her own reserve.

I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.

All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind that only pleases the sight but does not captivate the affections.

I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.

I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone keep the cobwebs out of my eyes.

The Knight of the Sad Countenance.

Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it

Drink moderately, for drunkenness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise

I never thrust my nose into other men’s porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine: Every man for himself and God for us all.

Fear has many eyes.

Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice

Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.

Make yourself honey and the flies will devour you.

Heaven’s help is better than early rising

Let us not throw the rope after the bucket.

Truth will rise above falsehood as oil above water.

For if he like a madman lived, at least he like a wise one died.

Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills:...

Never stand begging for what you have the power to earn.

Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up.

Tis a dainty thing to command, though ’twere but a flock of sheep.

Too much sanity may be madness

Give the devil his due

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases; what the eye ne’er sees, the heart ne’er rues

It is bad judgment to speak of halters in the house of a man who was hanged