John Dryden Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

John Dryden
Oh that my Pow'r to Saving were confin'd:
Why am I forc'd, like Heav'n, against my mind,
To make Examples of another Kind?
Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?
Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!
How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,
Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.

John Dryden
Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age.

John Dryden
For thee, sweet month; the groves green liveries wear.
If not the first, the fairest of the year;
For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours,
And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers.
When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun
The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on.

John Dryden
Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.

John Dryden
So the false spider, when her nets are spread, deep ambushed in her silent den does lie.

John Dryden
The Famous Rules which the French call, Des Trois Unités, or, The Three Unities, which ought to be observ'd in every Regular Play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.

John Dryden
He was exhaled; his great Creator drew
His spirit, as the sun the morning dew.

John Dryden
Fortune's unjust; she ruins oft the brave, and him who should be victor, makes the slave.

John Dryden
Forgiveness to the injured does belong;
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong.

John Dryden
What judgement I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject; to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose.

John Dryden
Great souls forgive not injuries till time has put their enemies within their power, that they may show forgiveness is their own.

John Dryden
To be the child of chance, and not of care, No atoms casually together hurl'd.

John Dryden
While I am compassed round With mirth, my soul lies hid in shades of grief, Whence, like the bird of night, with half-shut eyes, She peeps, and sickens at the sight of day.

John Dryden
They say everything in the world is good for something.

John Dryden
With odorous oil thy head and hair are sleek; And then thou kemb'st the tuzzes on thy cheek: Of these, my barbers take a costly care.

John Dryden
Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next, in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go.
To make a third, she joined the former two.

John Dryden
I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.

John Dryden
The perverseness of my fate is such that he's not mine because he's mine too much.

John Dryden
So poetry, which is in Oxford made
An art, in London only is a trade.

John Dryden
And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd
For one fair female, lost him half the kind.

John Dryden
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
Prodigious actions may as well be done, by weaver's issue, as the prince's son.

John Dryden
Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

John Dryden
Virgil is so exact in every word, that none can be changed but for a worse; nor any one removed from its place, but the harmony will be altered. He pretends sometimes to trip; but it is only to make you think him in danger of a fall, when he is most secure.

John Dryden