Quotes by English Authors - Page 43

My words fly up my thoughts remain below Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
William Shakespeare
How stand I, then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand menThat for a fantasy and trick of fameGo to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain? O, from this time forthMy thoughts be bloody or be nothing
William Shakespeare
One fire burns out another's burning,One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
William Shakespeare
She's beautiful and therefore to be woo'd: She is a woman therefore to be won.
William Shakespeare
Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.
William Hazlitt
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
William Shakespeare
If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down.
William Shakespeare
Thy best of rest is sleep,And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'stThy death, which is no more.
William Shakespeare
Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.
Francis Bacon
Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flow'rsFeed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowl, No homely morsels, and whatever thingThe Scyth of Time mows down, devour unspar'd, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect, And season him thy last and sweetest prey.
John Milton
The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I havementioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of theenterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beautyof colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successfulimprover to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which thesequalities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. Howeverbeautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, mightproduce one still more beautiful.
Thomas Robert Malthus
I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?
Francis Bacon
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
William Shakespeare
Friendship that flames goes out in a flash.
Thomas Fuller
Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope the same without such opinion despair.
Thomas Hobbes
The world's a scene of changes and to be constant in nature is inconstancy.
Abraham Cowley
We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.
Edmund Campion
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death.
William Shakespeare
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
[Act 5, Scene 4, ROSALIND] If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
William Shakespeare
DESDEMONACome, how wouldst thou praise me? IAGO I am about it; but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze; It plucks out brains and all: but my Muse labours, And thus she is deliver'd. If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, The one's for use, the other useth it. DESDEMONA Well praised! How if she be black and witty? IAGO If she be black, and thereto have a wit, She'll find a white that shall her blackness fit. DESDEMONA Worse and worse. EMILIA How if fair and foolish? IAGO She never yet was foolish that was fair; For even her folly help'd her to an heir. DESDEMONA These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse. What miserable praise hast thou for her that's foul and foolish? IAGO There's none so foul and foolish thereunto, But does foul pranks which fair and wise ones do.
William Shakespeare
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs Being purged a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears: What is it else? a madness most discreet A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
William Shakespeare
Time is the rider that breaks youth.
George Herbert
That which is everybody's business is nobody's business.
Izaak Walton
n sooth, I know not why I am so sad:It wearies me; you say it wearies you;But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,I am to learn;And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,That I have much ado to know myself.
William Shakespeare
Talkers are no good doers.
William Shakespeare
As to posterity I may ask what has it ever done to oblige me?
Thomas Gray
I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Archilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me.
Thomas Browne
I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there can be any kindness I can show or any good thing I can do to any fellow human being let me do it now.
William Penn
Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray
What shall I do to be for ever known,And make the age to come my own?
Abraham Cowley
But far more numerous was the herd of stfch Who think too little and who talk too much.
John Dryden
...for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman.--To be sure she must be an atheist!
Samuel Richardson
O lead me onward to the loneliest shade, The darkest place that quiet ever made, Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold And shut up green and open into gold.
John Clare
He that hath the steerage of my course,Direct my sail.
William Shakespeare
Words writ in waters.
George Chapman
Come on then, I will swear to study soTo know the thing I am forbid to know- Berowne
William Shakespeare
O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting ! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing.
Ordericus Vitalis
Love me love my dog.
John Heywood
And nothing is, but what is not.
William Shakespeare
We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and new Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries
Thomas Paine
Christian, how did you enjoy comfort before? Was the creature anything to you but a conduit, a pipe, that conveyed God's goodness to you? 'The pipe is cut off,' says God, 'come to me, the fountain, and drink immediately.' Though the beams are taken away, yet the sun remains the same in the firmament as ever it was.
Jeremiah Burroughs
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
Timon: Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon!
William Shakespeare
Words that weep and tears that speak.
Abraham Cowley
What sunshine is to flowers smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles to be sure but scattered along life's pathway the good they do is inconceivable.
Joseph Addison
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
Robert Burton
...I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters,...
Daniel Defoe
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
William Shakespeare
Some grief shows much of love,But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
William Shakespeare
My fugitive years are all hasting away,And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.'Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments I see,Have a being less durable even than he.
William Cowper
If I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest;
William Shakespeare
I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
John Clare
All of heaven we have below.
Joseph Addison
silence is not a langauge, its a weapon to make your dear one to feel
William Shakespeare
Clown: Good Madonna, why mournest thou?Olivia: Good Fool, for my brother's death.Clown:I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.Olivia:I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.
William Shakespeare
Of all the remedies it has pleased almighty God to give man to relieve his suffering, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.
Thomas Sydenham
No man is an island, entire of itself.
John Donne
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
I must go down to the sea again, for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call, that cannot be denied!
John Masefield