Merit challenges envy.
JOHN DRYDENOur souls sit close and silently within, And their own web from their own entrails spin; And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such, That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.
More John Dryden Quotes
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So softly death succeeded life in her, She did but dream of heaven, and she was there.
JOHN DRYDEN -
We by art unteach what Nature taught.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Those who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Our souls sit close and silently within, And their own web from their own entrails spin; And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such, That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Few know the use of life before ’tis past.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today: Be fair or foul or rain or shine, The joys I have possessed in spite of fate are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.
JOHN DRYDEN -
None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And, from the dregs of life, think to receive, What the first sprightly running could not give.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Plots, true or false, are necessary things, To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Among our crimes oblivion may be set.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.
JOHN DRYDEN -
When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Tis a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.
JOHN DRYDEN -
The glorious lamp of heaven, the radiant sun, Is Nature’s eye.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Fool that I was, upon my eagle’s wings I bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring, and now he mounts above me.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Politicians neither love nor hate.
JOHN DRYDEN -
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Errors like straws upon the surface flow, Who would search for pearls to be grateful for often must dive below.
JOHN DRYDEN -
I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Nothing to build, and all things to destroy.
JOHN DRYDEN -
Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.
JOHN DRYDEN