Abraham Cowley Quotes

There is some help for all the defects of fortune; for, if a man cannot attain to the length of his wishes, he may have his remedy by cutting of them shorter.

Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.

Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Man is too near all kinds of beasts,--a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture.

Fill the bowl with rosy wine, around our temples roses twine, And let us cheerfully awhile, like wine and roses, smile.

Thus would I double my life's fading space;For he that runs it well, runs twice his race.

Books should, not Business, entertain the Light; And Sleep, as undisturb'd as Death, the Night.

Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.

His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

All this world's noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy!

Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

Our yesterday's to-morrow now is gone, And still a new to-morrow does come on. We by to-morrow draw out all our store, Till the exhausted well can yield no more.

Come, my best Friends! my Books! and lead me on.

The world's a scene of changes and to be constant in nature is inconstancy.

This only grant me that my means may lie too low for envy for contempt too high.

Acquaintance I would have but when it depends not on the number but the choice of friends.

God the first garden made and the first city Cain.

Gold begets in brethren hate Gold in families debate Gold does friendship separate Gold does civil wars create.

A mighty pain to love it is and 'tis a pain that pain to miss but of all pains the greatest pain it is to love but love in vain.

Hope! of all ills that men endure The only cheap and universal cure.

Hope! Of all the ills that men endure the only cheap and universal cure.

Words that weep and tears that speak.

Enjoy the present hour Be thankful for the past And neither fear nor wish Th' approaches of the last.

Words that weep and tears that speak.