Sourced

• Facts are stubborn things.
  • Translation of Gil Blas. Book x. Chap. 1. (1749).
  • Also used by Jared Elliot in Essay on Field Husbandry, p. 35 (1747).

• Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
  Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye.
  Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
  Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
  • Ode to Independence, strophe 1.

• Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.
  • The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, (1771).

• Thy fatal shafts unerring move,
  I bow before thine altar, Love!
  • The Adventures of Roderick Random (1848), Chapter xl, reported in Bartlett's Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).