Top 100 Cowper's Quotes
#1. While offering to the Lord the results of Mr. Cowper's hallucination, or declaring it was Love that lifted her, Jean Louise shared the warmness that prevails among diverse individuals who find themselves in the same boat for one hour each week.
Harper Lee
#2. And hast thou sworn on every slight pretence,
Till perjuries are common as bad pence,
While thousands, careless of the damning sin,
Kiss the book's outside, who ne'er look'd within?
William Cowper
#3. A Christian's wit is offensive light,
A beam that aids, but never grieves the sight;
Vig'rous in age as in the flush of youth,
'Tis always active on the side of truth.
William Cowper
#4. She, that will with kittens jest, Should bear a kitten's joke.
William Cowper
#5. Detested sport, That owes its pleasures to another's pain.
William Cowper
#6. The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.
John Cowper Powys
#7. The slaves of custom and established mode,
With pack-horse constancy we keep the road
Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells,
True to the jingling of our leader's bells.
William Cowper
#8. Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.
William Cowper
#9. Accomplishments have taken virtue's place, and wisdom falls before exterior grace.
William Cowper
#10. A lawyer's dealings should be just and fair;
Honesty shines with great advantage there.
William Cowper
#11. They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.
William Cowper
#12. The Cross! There, and there only (though the deist rave, and the atheist, if Earth bears so base a slave); There and there only, is the power to save.
William Cowper
#13. All constraint, / Except what wisdom lays on evil men, / Is evil.
William Cowper
#15. Stamps God's own name upon a lie just made, To turn a penny in the way of trade.
William Cowper
#16. When nations are to perish in their sins, 'tis in the Church the leprosy begins.
William Cowper
#17. The man that dares traduce, because he can with safety to himself, is not a man.
William Cowper
#18. Events of all sorts creep or fly exactly as God pleases.
William Cowper
#19. God never meant that man should scale the Heavens
By strides of human wisdom. In his works,
Though wondrous, he commands us in his word
To seek him rather where his mercy shines.
William Cowper
#20. Far happier are the dead methinks than they who look for death and fear it every day.
William Cowper
#21. Give what thou canst, without Thee we are poor; And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.
William Cowper
#22. What is it but a map of busy life,
Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?
William Cowper
#23. Anticipated rents, and bills unpaid,
Force many a shining youth into the shade,
Not to redeem his time, but his estate,
And play the fool, but at the cheaper rate.
William Cowper
#24. Misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.
William Cowper
#25. I am out of humanity's reach.I must finish my journey alone,Never hear the sweet music of speech;I start at the sound of my own.
William Cowper
#27. And in that hour,
The seeds of cruelty, that since have swell'd
To such gigantic and enormous growth,
Were sown in human nature's fruitful soil.
Hence date the persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds,
Regardless of their plaints.
William Cowper
#28. Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys: Thy worst effect is banishing for hours The sex whose presence civilizes ours.
William Cowper
#29. As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.
William Cowper
#30. Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?
John Cowper Powys
#31. Men never understand that all a woman truly wants is a man who will listen.Understand.Pay her bills.And,of course,love her madly even when her hips wide due to an unfortunate addiction to bon bons.
- Lady Jersey to Mrs.Cowper,as the two watched dancers waltz at Almack's.
Karen Hawkins
#33. In the vast, and the minute, we see
The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing
And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds.
William Cowper
#34. [My kitten's] gambols are not to be described, and would be incredible, if they could.
William Cowper
#35. Moderation He that holds fast the golden mean, And lives contentedly between The little and the great, Feels not the wants that pinch the poor, Nor plagues that haunt the rich man's door Embittering all his state Horace, from Odes, Book II, translated by William Cowper
Daisy Goodwin
#36. Blest be the art that can immortalize,
the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim to quench it.
William Cowper
#37. I seem forsaken and alone, / I hear the lion roar; / And every door is shut but one, / And that is Mercy's door.
William Cowper
#39. Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appear'd, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard: To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth, ask'd ages more.
William Cowper
#40. The man that hails you Tom or Jack, and proves by thumps upon your back how he esteems your merit, is such a friend, that one had need be very much his friend indeed to pardon or to bear it.
William Cowper
#41. Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question.
John Cowper Powys
#42. My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
William Cowper
#43. Though peace be made, yet it's interest that keep peace.
William Cowper
#44. A man renowned for repartee will seldom scruple to make free with friendship's finest feeling, will thrust a dagger at your breast, and say he wounded you in jest, by way of balm for healing.
William Cowper
#45. But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.
William Cowper
#46. Variety's the very spice of life, that gives it all it's flavour.
William Cowper
#47. No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education.
John Cowper Powys
#48. And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast) / The lie that flatters I abhor the most.
William Cowper
#49. How shall I speak thee, or thy power address Thou God of our idolatry, the Press ... Like Eden's dead probationary tree, Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.
William Cowper
#50. This fond attachment to the well-known place
Whence first we started into life's long race,
Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway,
We feel it e'en in age, and at our latest day.
William Cowper
#51. Greece, sound, thy Homer's, Rome thy Virgil's name, But England's Milton equals both in fame.
William Cowper
#52. To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field.
William Cowper
#53. We sacrifice to dress till household joys and comforts cease. Dress drains our cellar dry, and keeps our larder lean.
William Cowper
#54. Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.
William Cowper
#57. All affectation; 'tis my perfect scorn;
Object of my implacable disgust.
William Cowper
#59. The solemn fop; significant and budge; A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge
William Cowper
#60. Thieves at home must hang; but he that puts Into his overgorged and bloated purse The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.
William Cowper
#61. We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree.
William Cowper
#62. I have a kitten,the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin.
William Cowper
#63. Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.
William Cowper
#64. Religion does not censure or exclude
Unnumbered pleasures, harmlessly pursued.
William Cowper
#65. The rich are too indolent, the poor too weak, to bear the insupportable fatigue of thinking.
William Cowper
#66. He bemoans our miseries with the tender pity of a Cowper, who, in warning us of life's grovelling pursuits and empty joys, seeks, by withdrawing us from their delusive dominion, to prepare us for "another and a better world." No.
Samuel Johnson
#67. He that negotiates between God and man, As God's ambassador, the grand concerns Of judgment and of mercy, should beware Of lightness in his speech.
William Cowper
#68. The kindest and the happiest pair Will find occasion to forbear; And something, every day they live, To pity, and perhaps forgive.
William Cowper
#69. Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
John Cowper Powys
#70. Words learn'd by rote a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse, Not more distinct from harmony divine The constant creaking of a country sign.
William Cowper
#71. What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?
John Cowper Powys
#72. Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
William Cowper
#73. There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
William Cowper
#74. A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun, It gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none.
William Cowper
#75. I venerate the man whose heart is warm, Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life, Coincident, exhibit lucid proof That he is honest in the sacred cause.
William Cowper
#76. Poor England! thou art a devoted deer,
Beset with every ill but that of fear.
The nations hunt; all mock thee for a prey;
They swarm around thee, and thou stand'st at bay.
William Cowper
#77. The Frenchman, easy, debonair, and brisk, Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, Is always happy, reign whoever may, And laughs the sense of mis'ry far away.
William Cowper
#78. Acquaint thyself with God, if thou would'st tasteHis works. Admitted once to his embrace,Thou shalt perceive that thou was blind before:Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heartMade pure shall relish with divine delightTill then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.
William Cowper
#79. Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees, Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze.
William Cowper
#80. Religion Caesar never knew Thy posterity shall sway, Where his eagles never flew, None as invincible as they.
William Cowper
#81. He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not color'd like his own, and having pow'r
T' enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
William Cowper
#82. Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; wisdom is humble that it knows no more.
William Cowper
#83. We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.
William Cowper
#85. Some to the fascination of a name, Surrender judgment hoodwinked.
William Cowper
#86. Strength may wield the ponderous spade, May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home; But elegance, chief grace the garden shows, And most attractive, is the fair result Of thought, the creature of a polished mind.
William Cowper
#87. I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.
William Cowper
#88. Solitude, seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave; a sepulchre in which the living lie, where all good qualities grow sick and die
William Cowper
#89. Not to understand a treasure's worth till time has stole away the slighted good, is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.
William Cowper
#90. What is there in the vale of lifeHalf so delightful as a wife;When friendship, love and peace combineTo stamp the marriage-bond divine?
William Cowper
#91. But what is truth? 'Twas Pilate's question put
To Truth itself, that deign'd him no reply.
William Cowper
#92. The trouble with Texas Baptists is that we do not hold them under water long enough.
William Cowper Brann
#93. Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
William Cowper
#95. Nature, exerting an unwearied power,
Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads
The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.
William Cowper
#96. Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.
William Cowper
#98. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart; he does not feel for man.
William Cowper
#99. Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing,
Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound.
William Cowper
#100. War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.
William Cowper
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