Initium caecitas, progressus labor, exitus dolor, error omnia. [Blindness at the beginning, labor in the middle, grief at the end, error in all.]

Of all my seeking this is all my gain:
No agony of any mortal brain
   Shall wrest the secret of the life of man;
The Search has taught me that the Search is vain.

Yet sometimes on a sudden all seems clear—
Hush! hush! my soul, the Secret draweth near;
   Make silence ready for the speech divine—
If Heaven should speak, and there be none to hear!

Yea! sometimes on the instant all seems plain,
The simple sun could tell us, or the rain;
   The world, caught dreaming with a look of heaven,
Seems on a sudden tip-toe to explain.

Like to a maid who exquisitely turns
A promising face to him who, waiting, burns
   In hell to hear her answer— so the world
Tricks all, and hints what no man ever learns.

Now, if a Muse cannot run when she is unfetter’d, ‘tis a sign she has but little speed.

Thus rag’d the goddess; and, with fury fraught,
The restless regions of the storms she sought,
Where, in a spacious cave of living stone,
The tyrant Æolus, from his airy throne,
With pow’r imperial curbs the struggling winds,
And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds.

I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; ‘tis like ivy round a sapling, and spoils the growth of the tree.

A wanton eye, a liquorish tongue, and a gamesome hand.

Many men neglect the tumults of the world, and care not for glory, and yet they are afraid of infamy, repulse, disgrace; they can severely contemn pleasure, bear grief indifferently, but they are quite battered and broken with reproach and obloquy (siqueidem vita et fama pari passu ambulant [seeing that life goes hand in hand with repute]), and are so dejected many times for some public injury, disgrace, as a box on the ear by their inferior, to be overcome of their adversary, foiled in the field, to be out in a speech, some foul act committed or disclosed, etc., that they dare not come abroad all their lives after, but melancholize in corners, and keep in holes.

…A mere madness, to live like a wretch, and die rich.

Horner: But I did not expect marriage from such a whoremaster as you; one that knew the town so much, and women so well.

Pinchwife: Why, I have married no London wife.

Horner: Pshaw! that’s all one. That grave circumspection in marrying a country wife, is like refusing a deceitful pampered Smithfield jade, to go and be cheated by a friend in the country.

Pinchwife: [Aside.] A pox on him and his simile!

The freedom of thought and speech arising from, and privileged by, our constitution, gives a force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people, not to be found under arbitrary governments where the ebullitions of vulgar wit are checked by the fear of the bastinado, or of a lodging during pleasure in some gaol or castle.