Top 44 Best John Dryden Quotes
#1. Immortal honour, endless fame, Attend the Almighty Father's name: The Saviour Son be glorified, Who for lost man's redemption died; And equal adoration be, Eternal Paraclete, to Thee. Amen. - RABANUS MAURUS (9TH C.); TRANSLATED BY JOHN DRYDEN (1631
David P. Gushee
#2. If one must be rejected, one succeed, make him my lord within whose faithful breast is fixed my image, and who loves me best.
John Dryden
#3. Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.
John Dryden
#4. Be secret and discreet; the fairy favors are lost when not concealed.
John Dryden
#6. He who proposes to be an author should first be a student.
John Dryden
#7. Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors.
John Dryden
#8. Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.
John Dryden
#9. The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
John Dryden
#11. Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
John Dryden
#12. A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.
John Dryden
#13. One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.
John Dryden
#14. He look'd in years, yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor, and autumnal green.
John Dryden
#15. When we view elevated ideas of Nature, the result of that view is admiration, which is always the cause of pleasure.
John Dryden
#16. And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd For one fair female, lost him half the kind.
John Dryden
#17. Seek not to know what must not be reveal, for joy only flows where fate is most concealed. A busy person would find their sorrows much more; if future fortunes were known before!
John Dryden
#18. Discover the opinion of your enemies, which is commonly the truest; for they will give you no quarter, and allow nothing to complaisance.
John Dryden
#20. Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.
John Dryden
#21. Him of the western dome, whose weighty sense Flows in fit words and heavenly eloquence.
John Dryden
#22. For all have not the gift of martyrdom.
John Dryden
#24. To take up half on trust, and half to try, Name it not faith but bungling bigotry.
John Dryden
#25. All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
John Dryden
#26. The scum that rises upmost, when the nation boils.
John Dryden
#27. Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
#28. But when to sin our biased nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires.
John Dryden
#29. O freedom, first delight of human kind!
John Dryden
#31. Love either finds equality or makes it.
John Dryden
#32. Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
John Dryden
#33. For every inch that is not fool, is rogue.
John Dryden
#34. Ill news is wing'd with fate, and flies apace.
John Dryden
#38. Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.
John Dryden
#39. When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind!
John Dryden
#40. Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.
John Dryden
#41. Silence in times of suffering is the best.
John Dryden
#42. Welcome, thou kind deceiver!
Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,
Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,
Even steal us from ourselves.
John Dryden
#43. The brave man seeks not popular applause, Nor, overpower'd with arms, deserts his cause; Unsham'd, though foil'd, he does the best he can, Force is of brutes, but honor is of man.
John Dryden
#44. Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.
John Dryden
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