Quotes by English Authors - Page 16

This rough magicI here abjure, and, when I have requiredSome heavenly music, which even now I do,To work mine end upon their senses thatThis airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,And deeper than did ever plummet soundI'll drown my book.
William Shakespeare
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
William Kingdon Clifford
If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Heywood
Past and to come seems best things present worst.
William Shakespeare
Friendship's a noble name 'tis love refined.
Susannah Centlivre
If I had read as much as other men I should have known no more than they.
Thomas Hobbes
Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.
Thomas More
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.
John Milton
Small herbs have grace, great weeds to grow apace.
William Shakespeare
They met me in the day of success: and I havelearned by the perfectest report, they have more inthem than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desireto question them further, they made themselves air,into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt inthe wonder of it, came missives from the king, whoall-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor;' by which title,before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referredme to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king thatshalt be!' This have I thought good to deliverthee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thoumightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by beingignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay itto thy heart, and farewell.
William Shakespeare
Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream
William Shakespeare
Each moment of a happy love's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
Aphra Behn
Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upwardTo what they were before.
William Shakespeare
The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it.
Thomas More
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;Or close the wall up with our English dead!In peace there's nothing so becomes a manAs modest stillness and humility:But when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then imitate the action of the tiger.
William Shakespeare
When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
Thomas Paine
An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever I could not sing an air to save my life but I have the intensest delight in music and can detect good from bad.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,All losses are restored and sorrows end.
William Shakespeare
I might call him. A thing divine, for nothing natural. I ever saw so noble.
William Shakespeare
Time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.
Francis Bacon
No man is an Island intire of it self every man is a peece of the Continent a part of the maine if a Clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the lesse as well as if a Promontorie were as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankinde and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee.
John Donne
This too shall pass.
William Shakespeare
Many have been the wise speeches of fools though not so many as the foolish speeches of wise men.
Thomas Fuller
An ounce of cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to serve God with.
Thomas Fuller
The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.
William Hazlitt
The world is my country all mankind are my brethren and to do good is my religion.
Thomas Paine
I will make thee think thy swan a crow.
William Shakespeare
The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.
Thomas Howard
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The real difference between men is energy.
Thomas Fuller
What cannot be altered must be borne not blamed.
Thomas Fuller
To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently abeast!
William Shakespeare
War he sung is toil and trouble Honour but an empty bubble.
John Dryden
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves.
William Shakespeare
turn him into stars and form a constellation in his image. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.
William Shakespeare
We do pray for mercy and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.
William Shakespeare
Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us. No one can interrupt us now... So come now, dearest friend, reveal your heart and speak your mind." (p. 29)
Aelred of Rievaulx
The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.
Thomas Robert Malthus
My crown is called content a crown that seldom kings enjoy.
William Shakespeare
As prayer without faith is but a beating of the air, so trust without prayer [is] but a presumptuous bravado. He that promises to give, and bids us trust His promises, commands us to pray, and expects obedience to his commands. He will give, but not without our asking.
Thomas Lye
The best work and of greatest merit for the public has proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.
Sir Francis Bacon
Arguments out of a petty mouth are unanswerable.
Joseph Addison
I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.
William Hope Hodgson
Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.
William Kingdon Clifford
When devils will the blackest sins put onThey do suggest at first with heavenly shows
William Shakespeare
But far more numerous was the herd of such,Who think too little, and who talk too much.
John Dryden
To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...
William Shakespeare
Cost little less than new before they're ended.
Colley Cibber
My man's as true as steel.
William Shakespeare
By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.
William Shakespeare
Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.
William Shakespeare
In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent upon one another. So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day or this week.
Jeremiah Burroughs
Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.
Thomas Hobbes
He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.
William Congreve
Conscience is but a word that cowards use Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
William Shakespeare
Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
William Cowper
Lxnig sentences in a short composition are like large rooms in a little house.
William Shenstone