Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
BEN JONSONOne woman reads another’s character Without the tedious trouble of deciphering
More Ben Jonson Quotes
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Greatness of name, in the father, ofttimes helps not forth, but overwhelms the son: They stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth.
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Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
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Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike; One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.
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To men pressed by their wants all change is ever welcome.
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Art hath an enemy call’d ignorance .
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God wisheth none should wreck on a strange shelf: To him man’s dearer than to himself.
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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.
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A prince without letters is a Pilot without eyes. All his government is groping.
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True gladness doth not always speak; joy, bred and born but in the tongue, is weak.
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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.
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Freedom doth with degree dispense.
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You are not now to think what’s best to do, As in beginnings, but what must be done, Being thus enter’d; and slip no advantage That may secure you. Let them call it mischief; When it is past, and prosper’d , ’twill be virtue.
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A good king is a public servant.
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A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night, It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see, And in short measures life may perfect be.
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Force works on servile natures, not the free.
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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.
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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.
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Folly often goes beyond her bounds, but impudence knows none.
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Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.
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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.
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O, for an engine, to keep back all clocks, or make the sun forget his motion!
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Cut Men’s throats with whisperings.
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Confound these ancestors… They’ve stolen our best ideas!
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Your highest female grace is silence.
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Prevent your day at morning.
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Calumnies are answered best with silence.
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