William Davenant Quotes

Anger is blood, poured and perplexed into froth; but malice is the wisdom of our wrath.

All slander must still be strangled in its birth, or time will soon conspire to make it strong enough to overcome the truth.

It is the wit and policy of sin to hate those we have abused.

Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.

Ambition is the mind's immodesty.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road.

Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

Think not ambition wise, because 't is brave.

How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

The assembled souls of all that men held wise.

Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.

Be not with honor's gilded baits beguil'd, Nor think ambition wise, because 'tis brave; For though we like it, as a forward child, 'Tis so unsound, her cradle is the grave.

O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave, The wise expect, the sorrowful invite, And all the good embrace, who know the grave A short dark passage to eternal light.

Small are the seeds fate does unheeded sow Of slight beginnings to important ends.

Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase By eating, and it fears to starve, unless It still may feed, and all it sees devour; Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.

Generous souls Are still most subject to credulity.

Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run.

What one cannot, another can.

For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught To be contented with the least.

All jealousy must be strangled in its birth.

How beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.

Had laws not been we never had been blam'd For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.