Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.
Every body consists of three ingredients. The names of these are Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt.
It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip.
Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition.
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
Purring is not so different from praying. To a tree, a cat's purr is one of the purest of all prayers, for in it lies a whole mixture of gratitude and longing, the twin ingredients of every prayer.
With all of the holiday cheer in the air, it's easy to overlook the ingredients in the foods. Ingredients such as salt, sugar, and fat - all of which leads to diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, strokes, heart disease, and cancer.
Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
Vanity is the poison of agreeableness; yet as poison, when artfully and properly applied, has a salutary effect in medicine, so has vanity in the commerce and society of the world.
The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.
Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.
I tell the truth and I don't try to sugarcoat things. But I also decided that if you don't use humor or satire, then it's just too dark all the time. And one of my favorite literary works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. As you know, that was an enormously famous satire piece that was able to point out, you know, things to people in a different way. And I do believe that satire and humor can reveal truth in a way that sometimes doesn't get revealed through other means. And so I decided to, every now and then, use satire and humor as well.
If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition... Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.
Satire is at once the most agreeable and most dangerous of mental qualities. It always pleases when it is refined, but we always fear those who use it too much; yet satire should be allowed when unmixed with spite, and when the person satirized can join in the satire.
Science does not enter a chaotic society to put order into it anymore, to simplify its composition, and to put an end to controversies. It does enter it, but to add new uncertain ingredients... to all the other ingredients that make up the collective experiments. When scientists add their findings to the mix, they do not put an end to politics; they add new ingredients to the collective process.
The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.