Drink today, and drown all sorrow; You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow; Best, while you have it, use your breath; There is no drinking after death.
BEN JONSONFollow a shadow, it still flies you, Seem to fly, it will pursue: So court a mistress, she denies you; Let her alone, she will court you. Say are not women truly, then, Styled but the shadows of us men?
More Ben Jonson Quotes
-
-
The two chief things that give a man reputation in counsel, are the opinion of his honesty, and the opinion of his wisdom; the authority of those two will persuade.
BEN JONSON -
Out of clothes out of countenance, out of countenance out of wit.
BEN JONSON -
Hell itself must yield to industry.
BEN JONSON -
As it is a great point of art, when our matter requires it, to enlarge and veer out all sail, so to take it in and contract it is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it.
BEN JONSON -
A good man should and must Sit rather down with loss than rise unjust.
BEN JONSON -
The man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him.
BEN JONSON -
There is no doctrine will do good where nature is wanting.
BEN JONSON -
Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell, if they would venture their industry the right way.
BEN JONSON -
Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.
BEN JONSON -
Reader look, not on his picture but his book.
BEN JONSON -
Let those that merely talk and never think, That live in the wild anarchy of drink
BEN JONSON -
If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man.
BEN JONSON -
Fortune, that favors fools.
BEN JONSON -
I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.
BEN JONSON -
The pipe marks the point at which the orangutan ends and man begins.
BEN JONSON -
For he that once is good, is ever great.
BEN JONSON -
Woman, the more careful she is about her face, the more careless about her house.
BEN JONSON -
Man and wife make one fool.
BEN JONSON -
Fear to do base, unworthy things is valor; if they be one to us, to suffer them is valor too.
BEN JONSON -
Very few men are wise by their own council, or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself, had a fool for a master.
BEN JONSON -
Freedom doth with degree dispense.
BEN JONSON -
Calumnies are answered best with silence.
BEN JONSON -
It is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by a wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.
BEN JONSON -
[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.
BEN JONSON -
A good poet’s made as well as born.
BEN JONSON -
Minds that are great and free, should not on fortune pause: ‘Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause.
BEN JONSON