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

Congreve

Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds,

And, though a late, a sure reward succeeds.

Born to excel, and to command!

As by transcendent beauty to attract

All eyes, so by pre-eminence of soul

To rule all hearts.

Critics to plays for the same end resort

That surgeons wait on trials in a court;

For innocence condemned they’ve no respect,

Provided they’ve a body to dissect.

Defer not till to-morrow to be wise,

To-morrow’s sun to thee may never rise.

For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds,

And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turn’d,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.

His pure thoughts were borne

Like fumes of sacred incense o’er the clouds,

And wafted thence on angels’ wings, through ways

Of light, to the bright source of all.

How rev’rend is the face of this tall pile,

Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads,

To bear aloft its arch’d and pond’rous roof!

By its own weight made steadfast and immovable.

Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe

And terror to my aching sight! The tombs

And monumental caves of death look cold,

And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,

To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

Shallow artifice begets suspicion,

And like a cobweb veil, but thinly shades

The face of thy design, alone disguising

What should have ne’er been seen, imperfect mischief.

Thought

Precedes the will to think, and error lives

Ere reason can be born. Reason, the power

To guess at right and wrong, the twinkling lamp

Of wand’ring life, that winks and wakes by turns

Fooling the follower ’twixt shade and shining.

When wit and reason both have fail’d to move

Kind looks and actions, (from success) do prove

Ev’n silence may be eloquent in love.

Who nothing has to lose, the war bewails;

And he who nothing pays, at taxes rails.

A fellow who lives in a windmill has not a more whimsical dwelling than the heart of a man that is lodged in a woman.

And the prettiest foot; Oh, if a man could but fasten his eyes to her feet as they steal in and out, and play at bo-peep under her petticoats, Ah! Mr. Trapland?

Ask me questions concerning to-morrow.

Grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it.

He only is secret who never was trusted.

He that loses hope may part with anything.

Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

His wit run him out of his money, and now his poverty has run him out of his wits.

I am a fool, I know it; and yet, God help me, I’m poor enough to be a wit.

I am tipsy with laughing.

I came up-stairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.

I know a lady that loves to talk so incessantly, she won’t give an echo fair play; she has that everlasting rotation of tongue that an echo must wait till she dies before it can catch her last words!

I like her, with all her faults: nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those affections which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable.

If there’s delight in love, ’tis when I see the heart which others bleed for bleed for me.

It is, alas! the poor prerogative of greatness, to be wretched and unpitied.

Married in haste, we repent at leisure.

O call not to my mind what you have done! It sets a debt of that account before me, which shows me poor and bankrupt even in hopes!

O sleep, why dost thou leave me? why thy visionary joy remove?

Poetry, the eldest sister of all arts, and parent of most.

Read and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth and chew the cud of understanding.

Read, read, sirrah, and refine your appetite; learn to live upon instruction; frost your mind and mortify your flesh.

The coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I would no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I would make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.

The falling-out of wits is like the falling-out of lovers: we agree in the main, like treble and bass.

They could neither of them speak for rage, and so fell a-sputtering at one another like two roasting apples.

Thought precedes the will to think, and error lives ere reason can be born.

Thy wife is a constitution of virtues: she’s the moon, and thou art the man in the moon.

Till sorrow seemed to wear one common face.

Timorous virgins form a dreadful chimera of a husband, as of a creature quite contrary to that soft, humble, pliant, easy thing, a lover.

Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life. Security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

Whoever is king, is also the father of his country.

Why, at this rate, a fellow that has but a groat in his pocket may have a stomach capable of a ten-shilling ordinary.

You are an annihilator of sense.

You read of but one wise man; and all that he knew was—that he knew nothing.

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