Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, Thou who art under ground to lie? Thou sow’st and plantest, but no fruit must see, For death, alas! is reaping thee.
ABRAHAM COWLEYNay, in death’s hand, the grape-stone proves As strong as thunder is in Jove’s.
More Abraham Cowley Quotes
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All the world’s bravery that delights our eyes is but thy several liveries.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
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.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
Life is an incurable disease.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
The Sunflow’r, thinking ’twas for him foul shame To nap by daylight, strove t’ excuse the blame
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
Let’s banish business, banish sorrow; To the gods belong to-morrow.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
“We may talk what we please,” he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, “of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
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?
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
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.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit, Or what is worse, be left by it? Why dost thou load thyself when thou ‘rt to fly, Oh, man! ordain’d to die?
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
When Israel was from bondage led,Led by the Almighty’s handFrom out of foreign land,The great sea beheld and fled.
ABRAHAM COWLEY -
What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own?
ABRAHAM COWLEY






