How near to good is what is fair!
BEN JONSONIf 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.
More Ben Jonson Quotes
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To men pressed by their wants all change is ever welcome.
BEN JONSON -
Success produces confidence; confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which accuracy had raised.
BEN JONSON -
The man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him.
BEN JONSON -
How Fortune piles her sports when she begins to practise them!
BEN JONSON -
[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.
BEN JONSON -
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.
BEN JONSON -
Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee; it springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech.
BEN JONSON -
Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.
BEN JONSON -
The Devil is an Ass , I do acknowledge it.
BEN JONSON -
A new disease? I know not, new or old, but it may well be called poor mortals plague for, like a pestilence, it doth infect the houses of the brain till not a thought, or motion, in the mind, be free from the black poison of suspect.
BEN JONSON -
If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick
BEN JONSON -
For they have the authority of years, and out of their intermission do win to themselves a kind of grace-like newness. But the eldest of the present, and newest of the past Language, is the best.
BEN JONSON -
Ambition makes more trusty slaves than need
BEN JONSON -
The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.
BEN JONSON -
There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.
BEN JONSON






