17th-century Author Quotes

Molière

Jonathan Swift

John Milton

Charles Perrault

Jean Racine

Jean de La Fontaine

Pierre Corneille

Negligence is the rust of the soul that corrodes through all her best resolves.

Come from your knees to the sermon, and come from the sermon to your knees

Public utility is often served by the injury of individuals.

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac

Welcome, brave Hero, to this course Retreat,
Thou who excell'st whatever Rome call'd great;
Great as thou art, yet others of thy Name
Shall thee transcend in martial Acts and Fame.
Two shall their Names from Africa receive,
As Asia did to thee thy Glories give.

The universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.

This is the sanctification of your studies: when they are devoted to God, and when He is the end, the object, and the life of them all.

He that will live in this World, must be endu'd with the three rare Qualities of Dissimulation, Equivocation, and mental Reservation.

When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen

Anne Bradstreet

Ask me no more, where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

To thee, and gentle Rigdom Funnidos,
Our gratulations flow in streams unbounded.

Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.

William Chamberlayne

When we are conscious of the least comparative merit in ourselves, we should take as much care to conceal the value we set upon it, as if it were a real defect; to be elated or vain upon it is showing your money before people in want.

A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.

William Congreve

True, I am young, but for souls nobly born
Valor doesn't await the passing of years.

Pierre Corneille

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader's ear to hear anything of praise from him.

Hark! She is called, the parting hour is come. Take thy farewell, poor world! Heaven must go home....

Richard Crashaw

Immense as Whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the Ocean till it boyl...

William Davenant

Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves respect; for of women do we not all come?

Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Uncertain ways unsafest are, and doubt a greater mischief than despair.

A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.

So some unlucky Engineer Does all the fit Materials compound, That are in Art or Nature found; Will glorious Fire-Works prepare.

We are not masters of our own affections; our inclinations dailyalter: now we love pleasure, and anon we shall dote on business. Human frailty will have it so, and who can help it?

George Etherege

Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.

George Farquhar

When the tempest rages,
In the Rock of Ages
I will safely hide;
Though the earth be shaking,
And all hearts be quaking,
Christ is at my side.