Quotes by English Authors - Page 4

Say a day without the ever.
William Shakespeare
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
When that the poor have cried Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious And Brutus is an honourable man.
William Shakespeare
How art thou out of breath when thou hast breathTo say to me that thou art out of breath?
William Shakespeare
The world's a scene of changes and to be constant in nature is inconstancy.
Abraham Cowley
... murder wol out
Geoffrey Chaucer
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,Men were deceivers ever,-One foot in sea and one on shore,To one thing constant never.
William Shakespeare
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
A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing.
William Shakespeare
Since good the more Communicated more abundant grows.
John Milton
If all the year were playing holidays To sport would be as tedious as to work.
William Shakespeare
One father is more than 100 schoolmasters.
George Herbert
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.
William Congreve
Make a virtue of necessity.
Geoffrey Chaucer
To be or not to be that is the question.
William Shakespeare
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Francis Bacon
Humility can weep over other men's weaknesses, and joy and rejoice over their graces.
Thomas Brooks
For books are not absolutely dead things, but... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless warriors be used, as good almost kill a Man a good Book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.John MiltonAreopagitica
John Milton
Parting is such sweet sorrow
William Shakespeare
Poetry the eldest sister of all arts and parent of most.
William Congreve
ROMEO :'Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here,Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dogAnd little mouse, every unworthy thing,Live here in heaven and may look on her,But Romeo may not. More validity,More honorable state, more courtship livesIn carrion flies than Romeo. They may seizeOn the white wonder of dear Juliet’s handAnd steal immortal blessing from her lips,Who even in pure and vestal modesty,Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.But Romeo may not. He is banishèd.Flies may do this, but I from this must fly.They are free men, but I am banishèd.And sayst thou yet that exile is not death?Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean,But “banishèd” to kill me?—“Banishèd”!O Friar, the damnèd use that word in hell.Howling attends it. How hast thou the heart,Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,A sin-absolver, and my friend professed,To mangle me with that word “banishèd”?
William Shakespeare
Uncertain way of gain. But I am inSo far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.
William Shakespeare
It was a precept of Pythagoras, that when we enter into the temple to worship God , we must not so much as speak or think of any worldly business, lest we make God's service an idle ,perfunctory, and lazy recreation. The same I may say of closet prayer.
Thomas Brooks
Where shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly 's done, when the battle 's lost and won
William Shakespeare
THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but pr
William Hazlitt
... and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days...
William Shakespeare
Danger past, God is forgotten.
Thomas Fuller
Oh goodness infinite, goodness immense!That all this good of evil shall produce,And evil turn to good; more wonderfulThan that which by creation first brought forthLight out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand,Whether I should repent me now of sinBy me done, and occasioned; or rejoiceMuch more, that much more good thereof shall spring;To God more glory, more good-will to menFrom God, and over wrath grace shall abound.
John Milton
O, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast;Who plead for love, and look for recompense,More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
William Shakespeare
He embraces all things that are lovely: he seals up the sum of all loveliness. Things that shine as single stars with a particular glory, all meet in Christ as a glorious constellation. Col. 1:19, "It pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell." Cast your eyes among all created beings, survey the universe: you will observe strength in one, beauty in a second, faithfulness in a third, wisdom in a fourth; but you shall find none excelling in them all as Christ does. Bread has one quality, water another, raiment another, medicine another; but none has them all in itself as Christ does. He is bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, a garment to the naked, healing to the wounded; and whatever a soul can desire is found in him, 1 Cor. 1:30
John Flavel
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
William Shakespeare
In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.
Thomas Paine
Upon this dispute not alone our lands and goods are engaged, but all that we call ours. These rights, these privileges, which made our fathers freemen, are in question.
John Eliot
Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
Luck is the residue of design.
John Milton
Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter.
Thomas Paine
We must be doing something to be happy.
William Hazlitt
You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.
Aphra Behn
Mother, I will look to like. If looking liking moves.
William Shakespeare
... reason andlove keep little company together now-a-days...
William Shakespeare
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Thomas Fuller
30 or 40 of such voluntary gentlemen would do more in a day than 100 of the rest that must be press'd to it by compulsion.
John Smith
Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have written the system himself, or procured it to be written in his life time. But there is no publication extant authenticated with his name. All the books called the New Testament were written after his death. He was a Jew by birth and by profession.
Thomas Paine
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole its body brevity and wit its soul.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An old man is twice a child.
William Shakespeare
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.
Thomas More
The smaller the drink the clearer the head.
William Penn
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
William Hazlitt
A peevish self-willed harlotry it is.*She’s a stubborn little brat.*
William Shakespeare
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause
William Shakespeare
All is best, though we oft doubt, what the unsearchable dispose, of highest wisdom brings about.
John Milton
Prayer should be short without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this or that He knows best what is good for us.
John Selden
But thoughts the slave of life, and life, Time’s fool,And Time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.
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
The Golden Age was never the present Age.
Thomas Fuller
The world is not a theater large enough to display the glory of Christ upon or unfold even half of the unsearchable riches that lie hidden in Him. And such is the deliciousness of this subject, Christ, that were there ten thousand volumes written upon it, they would never become tiring to the heart. We used to say that any one thing can finally tire us and this is true, except about this one eminent thing, Christ, and then one can never tire, for such is the variety of sweetness in Christ.
John Flavel
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
Francis Bacon
Histories make men wise poets witty the mathematics subtile natural philosophy deep morals grave logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Sir Francis Bacon
Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
John Donne