If happiness in self-content is placed, The wise are wretched, and fools only blessed.

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand, Which, to admire, we should not understand

Say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved.

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.

'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.

Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.

Nothing but you can lay hold of my mind, and that can lay hold of nothing but you.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

[M]an is not an island, he is more like a spaghetti junction.

Like a carpenter with two broken legs at the bottom of a beautiful staircase. Maybe I can't climb the stairs, ma'am, but at least let me admire the workmanship.

I want all the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to copulate me.

It's difficult to end with bangs if the judge takes away our ammunition.

I've admired Bill Kauffman's books for years . . . appealing, elegantly written, and entirely American.

Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.

Spaying is a compromise in terms of reverence for life, but perhaps a necessary one in a society which kills millions of dogs and cats a year in "animal shelters".

I just feel as though it's become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there's no real person inside of it.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.