To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man’s, into the world, as it is God’s.
ABRAHAM COWLEYThis only grant me, that my means may lie, too low for envy, for contempt to high.
More Abraham Cowley Quotes
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Enjoy the present hour, Be thankful for the past, And neither fear nor wish Th’ approaches of the last.
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Life for delays and doubts no time does give, None ever yet made haste enough to live.
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Fill all the Glasses there; for why Should every Creature Drink but I? Why, Man of Morals, tell me why?
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Neither the praise nor the blame is our own.
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May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.
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All the world’s bravery that delights our eyes is but thy several liveries.
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And I myself a Catholic will be, So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee. Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow On us, the Poets militant below.
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There Daphne’s Lover stopped, and thought it much The very leaves of her to touch: But Harvey, our Apollo, stopp’d not so; Into the Bark and Root he after her did go!
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Why to mute fish should’st thou thyself discoverAnd not to me, thy no less silent lover?
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Ah! Wretched and too solitary he who loves not his own company.
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:Though so exalted sheAnd I so lowly beTell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.
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Both wise, and both delightful too. And since Love ne’er will from me flee, A mistress moderately fair, And good as Guardian angels are, Only belov’d and loving me.
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Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!
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It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ear to hear anything of praise from him.
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His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.
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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?
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The liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.
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Awake, awake, my Lyre!And tell thy silent master’s humble taleIn sounds that may prevail;Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire
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Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.
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Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise As praises from the men, whom all men praise.
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A mighty pain to love it is, And ’tis a pain that pain to miss; But, of all pains, the greatest pain Is to love, but love in vain.
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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.
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For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.
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The spade, the plough-share, and the rake) Arts, in most cruel wise Man’s left to epitomize!
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Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise, He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river’s bank expecting stay
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What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own?
ABRAHAM COWLEY