Quotes by English Authors - Page 41

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleasedWith melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;Some chord in unison with what we hearIs touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
William Cowper
Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.
William Shakespeare
The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
William Shakespeare
Lorenzo: In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love to come again to Carthage Jessica: In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs that did renew old Aeson. Lorenzo: In such a night did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, and with an unthrift love did run from Venice, as far as Belmont. Jessica: In such a night did young Lorenzo swear he lov'd her well, stealing her soul with many vows of faith, and ne'er a true one. Lorenzo: In such a night did pretty Jessica (like a little shrow) slander her love, and he forgave it her. Jessica: I would out-night you, did nobody come; but hark, I hear the footing of a man.
William Shakespeare
Such a mad marriage never was before.
William Shakespeare
people have managed to marry without arithmetic
Geoffrey Chaucer
you will not be master of my body & my property
Geoffrey Chaucer
I'll follow this good man, and go with you;And, having sworn truth, ever will be true.
William Shakespeare
Now go with me and with this holy manInto the chantry by: there, before him,And underneath that consecrated roof,Plight me the full assurance of your faith.
William Shakespeare
I will deny thee nothing: Whereon, I do beseech thee, grant me this, To leave me but a little to myself.
William Shakespeare
Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them.
Samuel Pepys
Oh! How many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!
Colley Cibber
This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong artsMake of so noble individual partsOne fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.
John Donne
A young man married is a man that's marred.
William Shakespeare
I told him I had, perhaps, different notions of matrimony from what the received custom had given us of it; that I thought a woman was a free agent as well as a man, and was born free, and, could she manage herself suitably, might enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the men do; that the laws of matrimony were indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time acted quite upon other principles, and those such that a woman gave herself entirely away from herself, in marriage, and capitulated, only to be, at best, but an upper servant, and from the time she took the man she was no better or worse than the servant among the Israelites, who had his ears bored—that is, nailed to the door-post—who by that act gave himself up to be a servant during life; that the very nature of the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after—that is to say, a slave.
Daniel Defoe
I'll have no husband, if you be not he.
William Shakespeare
And too soon Marred are those so early Made.
William Shakespeare
Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.
William Shakespeare
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,And for thy maintenance; commits his bodyTo painful labor, both by sea and land;To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;And craves no other tribute at thy handsBut love, fair looks, and true obedience-Too little payment for so great a debt.Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband;And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,And no obedient to his honest will,What is she but a foul contending rebel,And graceless traitor to her loving lord?I asham’d that women are so simple‘To offer war where they should kneel for peace,Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,But that our soft conditions, and our hearts,Should well agree with our external parts?
William Shakespeare
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
William Shakespeare
MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Now is a time to storm; why art thou still?TITUS ANDRONICUS: Ha, ha, ha!MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour.TITUS ANDRONICUS: Why, I have not another tear to shed:
William Shakespeare
If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion.
William Shakespeare
Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
John Milton
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
Joseph Addison
One fire burns out another's burning,One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
William Shakespeare
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urnThrows up a steamy column and the cupsThat cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,So let us welcome peaceful ev'ning in.
William Cowper
A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.
William Shakespeare
Nature hath no goal, though she hath law.
John Donne
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,That dances as often as dance it can,Hanging so light, and hanging so high,On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
But now at last the sacred influenceOf light appears, and rom the walls of Heav'nShoots far into the bosom of dim NightA glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins her farthest verge, and Chaos to retireAs from her outmost works a broken foeWith tumult less and with less hostile din,
John Milton
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude And fled to the silence of sweet solitude. Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades, Unseen of all shepherds and flower-loving maids— The hermit bees find them but once and away. There I'll bury alive and in silence decay.
John Clare
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
When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is—the sense of the supernatural in nature.
William Henry Hudson
The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.
Thomas Hobbes
Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.
Francis Bacon
He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
Thomas Fuller
Everything in ...nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a. ..visible outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness. ..from it, we find. ..it in its eternal state.
William Law
Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.
John Masefield
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
Francis Bacon
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
William Shakespeare
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noiseHath chid down all the majesty of England;Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,And that you sit as kings in your desires,Authority quite silent by your brawl,And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taughtHow insolence and strong hand should prevail,How order should be quelled; and by this patternNot one of you should live an aged man,For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishesWould feed on one another....Say now the kingShould so much come too short of your great trespassAs but to banish you, whither would you go?What country, by the nature of your error,Should give your harbour? go you to France or Flanders,To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England,Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleasedTo find a nation of such barbarous temper,That, breaking out in hideous violence,Would not afford you an abode on earth,Whet their detested knives against your throats,Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that GodOwed not nor made you, nor that the claimantsWere not all appropriate to your comforts,But chartered unto them, what would you thinkTo be thus used? this is the strangers case;And this your mountainish inhumanity.
William Shakespeare
... murder wol out
Geoffrey Chaucer
Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our generation you shall find.
William Shakespeare
It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
Thomas More
We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
William Shakespeare
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
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
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.
William Shakespeare
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Thomas Paine
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.
William Shakespeare
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Thomas Paine
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine
Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.
Ælfrēd of Wessex
Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough tomake them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or haveThings of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those thatare full of precious Drugs.They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and levelDwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of theWinds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings haveneed of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to theWeather.
William Penn
I can't talk, or I will throw up!
William Shakespeare
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.----Alcuni libri devono essere gustati, altri masticati e digeriti, vale a dire che alcuni libri vanno letti solo in parte, altri senza curiosità, e altri per intero, con diligenza ed attenzione. Alcuni libri possono essere letti da altri e se ne possono fare degli estratti, ma ciò riguarderebbe solo argomenti di scarsa importanza o di libri secondari perché altrimenti i libri sintetizzati sono come l’acqua distillata, evanescente. La lettura completa la formazione di un uomo; il parlare lo fa abile, e la scrittura lo trasforma in un uomo preciso. E, pertanto, se un uomo scrive poco, deve avere una grande memoria, se parla poco ha bisogno di uno spirito arguto; se legge poco deve avere bisogno di molta astuzia in modo da far sembrare di sapere quello che non sa. Le storie fanno gli uomini saggi; i poeti arguti; la matematica sottile; la filosofia naturale profondi; la logica e la retorica abili nella discussione.
Bacon Francis 1561-1626 Francis
I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.
William Hope Hodgson
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon