dots-menu
×

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

Otway

  • Ambition is a lust that’s never quenched,
  • Grows more inflamed, and madder by enjoyment.
  • Avoid the politic, the factious fool,
  • The busy, buzzing, talking harden’d knave;
  • The quaint smooth rogue that sins against his reason,
  • Calls saucy loud sedition public zeal,
  • And mutiny the dictates of his spirit.
  • Greatness, thou gaudy torment of our souls,
  • The wise man’s fetter, and the rage of fools.
  • How many men
  • Have spent their blood in their dear country’s service,
  • Yet now pine under want; while selfish slaves,
  • That even would cut their throats whom now they fawn on,
  • Like deadly locusts, eat the honey up,
  • Which those industrious bees so hardly toil’d for.
  • Like conquering tyrants you our breasts invade,
  • Where you are pleas’d to ravage for awhile;
  • But soon you find new conquests out and leave
  • The ravag’d province ruinate and bare.
  • My eyes won’t lose the sight of thee,
  • But languish after thine, and ache with gazing.
  • O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
  • To temper man; we had been brutes without you.
  • Angels are painted fair to look like you:
  • There’s in you all that we believe of heaven,
  • Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
  • Eternal joy, and everlasting love.
  • The pain is in my head; ’tis is in my heart;
  • ’Tis everywhere; it rages like a madness,
  • And I most wonder how my reason holds.
  • You talk to me in parables.
  • You may have known that I’m no wordy man,
  • Fine speeches are the instruments of knaves
  • Or fools that use them, when they want good sense;
  • But honesty
  • Needs no disguise nor ornament: be plain.
  • Base natures ever judge a thing above them, and hate a power they are too much obliged to.

    Children blessings seem, but torments are.

    Clocks will go as they are set; but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.

    Could my griefs speak, the tale would have no end.

    Cowards are scared with threatenings; boys are whipped into confession; but a steady mind acts of itself, ne’er asks the body counsel.

    Dame Fortune, like most others of the female sex, is generally most indulgent to the nimble-mettled blockheads.

    False as the adulterate promises of favorites in power when poor men court them.

    Fine speeches are the instruments of fools or knaves, who use them when they want good sense; but honesty needs no disguise or ornament.

    Honesty needs no disguise or ornament.

    I know not how to tell thee! Shame rises in my face, and interrupts the story of my tongue!

    If we must part forever, give me but one kind word to think upon and please myself with, while my heart is breaking.

    Indeed, you thanked me; but a nobler gratitude rose in her soul, for from that hour she loved me.

    Justice is lame as well as blind among us.

    Love reigns a very tyrant in my heart.

    No flattery, boy! an honest man cannot live by it; it is a little, sneaking art, which knaves use to cajole and soften fools withal.

    Revenge, the attribute of gods! they stamped it with their great image on our natures.

    She who has beauty might ensnare a conqueror’s soul, and make him leave his crown at random, to be scuffled for by slaves.

    The queen of night shines fair with all her virgin stars about her.

    The worst thing an old man can be is a lover.

    There is such sweet pain in parting that I could hang forever on thine arms, and look away my life into thine eyes.

    Welcome as happy tidings after fears.

    Who’s a prince or beggar in the grave?