Quotes by English Authors - Page 23

...and there encountered with him all at once Sir Bors, Sir Ector, and Sir Lionel, and they three smote him at once with their spears, and with force of themselves they smote Sir Lancelot's horse reverse to the earth. And by misfortune Sir Bors smote Sir Lancelot through the shield into the side...
Thomas Malory
Sin, death, and hell have set their marks on him,And all their ministers attend on him.
William Shakespeare
Deal mildly with his youth; for young hot colts, being rag's, do rage the more.
William Shakespeare
That government is best which governs least.
Thomas Paine
Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite,That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy:Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:It shall be waited on with jealousy,Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end,Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud,Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while;The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'dWith sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:The strongest body shall it make most weak,Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak.'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild,Make the young old, the old become a child.'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear;It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;It shall be merciful and too severe,And most deceiving when it seems most just;Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.'It shall be cause of war and dire events,And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire;Subject and servile to all discontents,As dry combustious matter is to fire:Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy,They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.
William Shakespeare
It is left only to God and to the angels to be lookers on.
Francis Bacon
There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come.
William Shakespeare
This is the very ecstasy of love,Whose violent property fordoes itselfAnd leads the will to desperate undertakingsAs oft as any passion under heavenThat does afflict our natures.
William Shakespeare
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,All just supply, and all relation;Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,For every man alone thinks he hath gotTo be a phoenix, and that then can beNone of that kind, of which he is, but he.
John Donne
Every horse thinks his own pack heaviest.
Thomas Fuller
The time is out of joint.
William Shakespeare
Travellers ne'er did lie,Though fools at home condemn 'em.-Antonio
William Shakespeare
One father is more than 100 schoolmasters.
George Herbert
What we are is not all that we may become.
William Shakespeare
Great was the work of creation, but greater was the work of redemption. Great wisdom was seen in making us—but more miraculous wisdom in saving us. Great power was seen in bringing us out of nothing—but greater power in helping us when we were worse than nothing. (...) In the creation, God gave us ourselves; in the redemption, He gave us Himself.
Thomas Watson
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
William Shakespeare
The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Love is holy.
William Shakespeare
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
John Milton
A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.
William Shakespeare
Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
Thomas Gray
Music and women I cannot but give way to whatever my business is.
Samuel Pepys
Why then should witless man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?
Edmund Spenser
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Thomas Paine
Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
George Savile Halifax
I love thee I love but thee With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold And the stars grow old.
William Shakespeare
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
William Shakespeare
To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...
William Shakespeare
There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know!
John Dryden
I have the heart of a man, not a woman, and I am not afraid of anything.
Elizabeth I
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare
Many eat that on earth that they digest in hell.
Thomas Brooks
O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
John Clare
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions-the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile a kind look a heart-felt compliment and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To be loved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I can't talk, or I will throw up!
William Shakespeare
Be as thou wast wont to be.
William Shakespeare
The present is an eternal now.
Abraham Cowley
... and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days...
William Shakespeare
such wanton, wild, and usual slips/ As are companions noted and most known/ To youth and liberty.
William Shakespeare
To take arms against a sea of troubles.
William Shakespeare
..What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering,does becomeThe opposite of itself..
William Shakespeare
What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; it's dearness only that gives everthing its value.
Thomas Paine
I'll be supposed upon a book, his face is the worst thing about him.
William Shakespeare
Boast not of what thou would'st have done but do.
John Milton
So furiously each other did assayle, As if their soules they would attonce haue rent Out of their brests, that streames of bloud did rayle Adowne, as if their springes of life were spent; That all the ground with purple bloud was sprent, And all their armours staynd with bloudie gore, Yet scarcely once to breath would they relent, So mortall was their malice and so sore,Become of fayned friendship which they vow'd afore.
Edmund Spenser
To die, is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self: a deadly banishment! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by, And feed upon the shadow of perfection.Except I be by Silvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale; Unless I look on Silvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon; She is my essence, and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.
William Shakespeare
The pleasures of the rich are bought with the tears of the poor.
Thomas Fuller
REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
POLONIUS : My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.HAMLET : God's bodykins man, better. Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
William Shakespeare
I to myself am dearer than a friend.
William Shakespeare
Live desired in the world, and die lamented.
Richard Sibbes
If we must part forever,Give me but one kind word to think uponand please myself with, while my heart's breaking.
Thomas Otway
(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)"[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ... We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us.
Elizabeth I
The ides of March are come.
William Shakespeare
Then, were not summer's distillation leftA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
William Shakespeare
He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise.
Thomas Fuller
He kills her in her own humor.
William Shakespeare
Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many...
William Bradford