William Davenant Quotes

#1. Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.

William Davenant

#2. Think not ambition wise, because 't is brave.

William Davenant

#3. Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.

William Davenant

#4. How beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.

William Davenant

#5. The assembled souls of all that men held wise.

William Davenant

#6. To be rich be diligent; move on
Like heav'ns great movers that enrich the earth;
Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
Rich are the diligent who can command
Time
nature's stock.

William Davenant

#7. Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run.

William Davenant

#8. Be not with honor's gilded baits beguil'd,
Nor think ambition wise, because 'tis brave;
For though we like it, as a forward child,
'Tis so unsound, her cradle is the grave.

William Davenant

#9. Generous souls
Are still most subject to credulity.

William Davenant

#10. All slander must still be strangled in its birth, or time will soon conspire to make it strong enough to overcome the truth.

William Davenant

#11. O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave,
The wise expect, the sorrowful invite,
And all the good embrace, who know the grave
A short dark passage to eternal light.

William Davenant

#12. Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.

William Davenant

#13. What one cannot, another can.

William Davenant

#14. All jealousy must be strangled in its birth ...

William Davenant

#15. It is the wit and policy of sin to hate those we have abused.

William Davenant

#16. Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase
By eating, and it fears to starve, unless
It still may feed, and all it sees devour;
Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.

William Davenant

#17. Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

William Davenant

#18. Anger is blood, poured and perplexed into froth; but malice is the wisdom of our wrath.

William Davenant

#19. For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught
To be contented with the least.

William Davenant

#20. Ambition is the mind's immodesty.

William Davenant

#21. Small are the seeds fate does unheeded sow
Of slight beginnings to important ends.

William Davenant

#22. Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

William Davenant

#23. Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

William Davenant

#24. Go! dive into the Southern Sea, and when
Th'ast found, to trouble the nice sight of men,
A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth
Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth,
Give it Endymion's love, whose ev'ry tear
Would more enrich the skilful jeweller.

William Davenant

#25. How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

William Davenant

#26. Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road.

William Davenant