While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. - Samuel Johnson

Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.

I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.