C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Beaumont and Fletcher

And he that will to bed go sober,

Falls with the leaf still in October.

Banish all compliments but single truth,

From every tongue, and every shepherd’s heart,

Let them use still persuading, but no art.

Corruption is a tree, whose branches are

Of an unmeasurable length: they spread

Everywhere; and the dew that drops from thence

Hath infected some chairs and stools of authority.

Death rides in triumph,—fell destruction

Lashes his fiery horse, and round about him

His many thousand ways to let out souls.

Great things thro’ the greatest hazards are achiev’d,

And then they shine.

He that intends well, yet deprives himself

Of means to put his good thoughts into deed,

Deceives his purpose of the due reward.

His travel has not stopp’d him

As you suppose, nor alter’d any freedom,

But made him far more clear and excellent:

It drains the grossness of the understanding,

And renders active and industrious spirit:

He that knows men’s manners, must of necessity

Best know his own, and mend those by examples:

’T is a dull thing to travel like a mill-horse,

Still in the place he was born in, round and blinded.

I look down upon him

With such contempt and scorn, as on my slave;

He’s a name only, and all good in him

He must derive from his great grandsire’s ashes,

For had not their victorious acts bequeathed

His titles to him, and wrote on his forehead,

“This is a lord,” he had lived unobserved

By any man of mark and died as one

Amongst the common rout.

Is there no constancy in earthly things?

No happiness in us, but what must alter?

No life, without the heavy load of fortune?

What miseries we are, and to ourselves?

Ev’n then when full content seems to sit by us,

What daily sores and sorrows.

Nothing is a misery,

Unless our weakness apprehend it so:

We cannot be more faithful to ourselves,

In anything that’s manly, than to make

Ill-fortune as contemptible to us

As it makes us to others.

O great corrector of enormous times,

Shaker of o’er-rank states, thou grand decider

Of duty and old titles, that healest with blood

The earth when it is sick and curest the world

O’ the pleurisy of people.

Of every noble action the intent

Is to give worth reward—vice punishment.

Oh, Woman, perfect woman! what distraction

Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!

What an inviting hell invented.

Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything,

Yet will we strive to swim to the top.

Set hills on hills betwixt me and the man

That utters this, and I will scale them all;

And from the utmost top fall on his neck,

Like thunder from a cloud.

That place that does contain

My books, the best companions, is to me

A glorious court, where hourly I converse

With the old sages and philosophers;

And sometimes, for variety, I confer

With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;

Calling their victories, if unjustly got,

Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,

Deface their ill-placed statues.

Then, my good girls, be more than women, wise;

At least be more than I was; and be sure

You credit anything the light gives life to,

Before a man.

There’s nothing that allays an angry mind

So soon as a sweet beauty.

This is a beautiful life now, privacy,

The sweetness and the benefit of essence;

I see there is no man but may make his paradise,

And it is nothing but his love and dotage

Upon the world’s foul joys that keeps him out on’t.

Three merry boys, and three merry boys,

And three merry boys are we,

As ever did sing in a hempen string

Under the gallow-tree.

’Tis a word that’s quickly spoken,

Which being restrained, a heart is broken.

We are all soldiers, and all venture lives;

And where there’s no difference in men’s worths

Titles are all jests.

What is danger

More than the weakness of our apprehensions?

A poor cold part o’ th’ blood; who takes it hold of?

Cowards and wicked livers: valiant minds

Were made the masters of it.

What’s one man’s poison, signior,

Is another’s meat or drink.

Woman, they say, was only made of man;

Methinks ’tis strange they should be so unlike!

It may be all the best was cut away,

To make the woman, and the naught was left

Behind with him.

A man in authority is but as a candle in the wind, sooner wasted or blown out than under a bushel.

A soul as white as Heaven.

Absence is all love’s crime.

Calamity is man’s true touchstone.

Care seeks out wrinkled brows and hollow eyes, and builds himself caves to abide in them.

Charity ever finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet in the receiver.

Death comes but once.

Deeds, not words.

Discretion and hardy valor are the twins of honor, and, nursed together, make a conqueror; divided, but a talker.

Discretion, the best part of valor.

Do not cherish that daring vice for which the whole age suffers—these private duels—which had their first original from the French and for which to this day we’re justly censured, are banished from all civil government.

Equality is no rule in Love’s grammar.

From the crown of our head to the sole of our foot.

He went away with a flea in ’s ear.

Hit the nail on the head.

Honest minds are pleased with honest things.

Hunger is sharper than the sword.

I find the medicine worse than the malady.

It is godlike to have power, but not to kill.

It is the crown of justice, and the glory, where it may kill with right, to save with pity.

Lie lightly on my ashes, gentle earth!

No friend’s a friend till he shall prove a friend.

Nothing is thought rare which is not new, and followed; yet we know that what was worn some twenty years ago comes into grace again.

Of all the paths leading to a woman’s love, pity is the straightest.

One foot in the grave.

Our lives are but our marches to the grave.

Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet still we strive to swim upon the top.

Speak boldly, and speak truly, shame the devil.

Struck blind with beauty! shot with a woman’s smile.

The greatest attribute of Heaven is mercy.

The wanton lawns, more soft and white than milk.

There is an hour in each man’s life appointed to make his happiness, if then he seize it.

There is no jesting with edge tools.

There is no man but may make his paradise.

There’s a method in man’s wickedness; it grows up by degrees.

Thy clothes are all the soul thou hast.

’Tis godlike to have power, but not to kill.

We want a boy extremely for this function.

What mare’s nest hast thou found?

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