William Congreve - Love for Love (1695)

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Aye, 'tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

William Congreve
I warrant you, if he danced till doomsday, he thought I was to pay the piper.

William Congreve
You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words.

William Congreve
Marriage indeed may qualify the fury of his passion, but it very rarely mends a man's manners.

William Congreve
To converse with Scandal is to play at Losing Loadum, you must lose a good name to him, before you can win it for yourself.

William Congreve
Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

William Congreve
To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.

William Congreve
I am a fool, I know it; and yet, Heaven help me, I'm poor enough to be a wit.

William Congreve
Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

William Congreve
A woman only obliges a man to secrecy, that she may have the pleasure of telling herself.

William Congreve
Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.

William Congreve
Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

William Congreve
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.

William Congreve
Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.

William Congreve
He that first cries out stop thief, is often he that has stolen the treasure.

William Congreve
Has he not a rogue's face?…a hanging-look to me…has a damned Tyburn-face, without the benefit o' the Clergy.

William Congreve
I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.

William Congreve
A branch of one of your antediluvian families, fellows that the flood could not wash away.

William Congreve
I came up stairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar.

William Congreve
Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude.

William Congreve
I know that's a secret, for it's whispered every where.

William Congreve