Quotes by English Authors - Page 23

Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.
William Shakespeare
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!O any thing, of nothing first create!O heavy lightness, serious vanity,Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
William Shakespeare
Out of her favour, where I am in love.
William Shakespeare
Macbeth does murder sleep - the innocent sleep,Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.
William Shakespeare
I choose my life to this free. I choose my life to be this way
Thomas Paine
...if pride, that plague of human nature, that source of so much misery, did not hinder it; for this vice does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the misery of others; and would not be satisfied with being thought a goddess, if none were left that were miserable, over whom she might insult. Pride thinks its own happiness shines the brighter, by comparing it with the misfortunes of other persons; that by displaying its own wealth they may feel their poverty the more sensibly.
Thomas More
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
William Shakespeare
Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none. Beatrice: A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me. -Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
Francis Bacon
The merit of persons is to be no rule of our charity, but we are to do acts of kindness to those that least deserve it.
William Law
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
William Shakespeare
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
William Shakespeare
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
When we our betters see bearing our woes,We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
William Shakespeare
A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
William Shakespeare
One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight, beyond the bliss of dreams.
John Milton
Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.
William Shakespeare
As God loves me, when I consider this, then every modern society seems to me to be nothing but a conspiracy of the rick, who while protesting their interest in the common good pursue their own interests and stop at no trick and deception to secure their ill-gotten possessions, to pay as little as possible for the labor that produces their wealth and so force its makers to accept the nearest thing to nothing. They contrive rules for securing and assuring these tidy profits for the rich in the name of the common good, including of course the poor, and call them laws!
Thomas More
Good God! how should the mitral valves prevent the regurgitation of air and not of blood?
William Harvey
Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.
John Dryden
Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
William Shakespeare
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness,/ Wherein the...enemy does much.
William Shakespeare
See you now your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth; and thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlasses and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out.
William Shakespeare
And thus I clothe my naked villainyWith odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
William Shakespeare
Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.
Samuel Pepys
Therefor I doubt not but, if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, ‘that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square,’ that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.
Thomas Hobbes
it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance
William Shakespeare
In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;Fairies use flower for their charactery.
William Shakespeare
You see we do, yet see you but our handsAnd this the bleeding business they have done:Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful
William Shakespeare
Within the infant rind of this small flowerPoison hath residence and medicine power.For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.Two such opposèd kings encamp them still,In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will. And where the worser is predominant,Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.(Inside the little rind of this weak flower, there is both poison and powerful medicine. If you smell it, you feel good all over your body. But if you taste it, you die. There are two opposite elements in everything, in men as well as in herbs—good and evil. When evil is dominant, death soon kills the body like cancer.)
William Shakespeare
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
William Shakespeare
In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
William Hazlitt
Do not think, Oh, that I were delivered from all these afflictions and troubles here in this world! If you were, then you would have more ease yourself, but this is a way of honoring God, and manifesting the excellence of grace here, when you are in this conflict of temptation, which God shall not have from you in Heaven.
Jeremiah Burroughs
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
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
In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent upon one other. 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
So be satisfied and quiet, be contented with your contentment. I lack certain things that others have, but blessed be God, I have a contented heart which others have not.
Jeremiah Burroughs
A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.
Joseph Addison
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, and they shall live, and he in them still green.
William Shakespeare
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
I shall bere your noble fame, for ye spake a grete worde and fulfilled it worshipfully.
Thomas Malory
And I may not omit here a special work of God's providence. There was a proud and very profane young man [aboard the Mayflower], one of the seamen, of a lusty, able body, which made him the more haughty; he would always be contemning the poor people in their [sea]sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help cast half of them overboard before they came to their journey's end, and to make merry with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly.But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself the first that was thrown overboard. Thus his curses light on his own head; and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.
William Bradford
Middle Tennessee? Really? My bracket is more busted than Screech's face during puberty.
William Shakespeare
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.
William Shakespeare
Not so on Man; him through their malice fall'n,Father of Mercy and Grace, thou didst not doomSo strictly, but much more to pity incline:No sooner did thy dear and only SonPerceive thee purpos'd not to doom frail ManSo strictly, but much more to pity inclin'd,He to appease thy wrath, and end the strifeOf mercy and Justice in thy face discern'd,Regardless of the Bliss wherein hee satSecond to thee, offer'd himself to dieFor man's offence. O unexampl'd love,Love nowhere to be found less than Divine!Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy NameShall be the copious matter of my SongHenceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praiseForget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin.
John Milton
Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseenWithin thy airy shellBy slow Meander's margent green,And in the violet-imbroider'd valeWhere the love-lorn nightingaleNightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pairThat likest thy Narcissus are?
John Milton
The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology.
Thomas Paine
Ah for pittie, wil ranke Winters rage,These bitter blasts neuer ginne tasswage?The keene cold blowes throug my beaten hyde,All as I were through the body gryde.My ragged rontes all shiver and shake,As doen high Towers in an earthquake:They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tailes,Perke as Peacock: but nowe it auales.
Edmund Spenser
And after winter folweth grene May.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Perhpas if I call out to Rat he might hear," said the Mole to himself, but without much hope.Rat! Ratty! O Rat, please hear me!" he called out as loudly as he could, holding up his lantern as he did so, waving it about/ But the wind rushed and roared around him even more, and snatched his weak words away the moment they were they were uttered, and scattered them wildly and uselessly as if they were flakes of snow,Even worse, the light of the lantern began to gutter, and then, quiet suddenly, an extra strong gust of wind blew it out.Well then," said the daunted but resolute Mole, putting the spent lantern on the ground, "there's nothing else for it! Frozen rivers are dangerous thinngs, no doubt, but I must try to cross, despite the dangers."--The Willows in the Winter
William Horwood
When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,Then nightly sings the staring owl, To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all aloud the wind doe blow,And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl,To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
William Shakespeare
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a Sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming.
John Donne
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
Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.
Thomas Paine
When we don't pray, we quit the fight. Prayer keeps the Christian's armor bright. And Satan trembles when he sees. The weakest saint upon his knees.
William Cowper
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.
Francis Bacon
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in proper figures.
Joseph Addison
Fact be virtuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth
Thomas Hobbes
Luck is the residue of design.
John Milton