John Dryden Quotes

Second thoughts, they say, are best.

Like you, an alien in a land unknown,
I learn to pity woes so like my own.

…So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky

She knows her man, and when you rant and swear,
Can draw you to her with a single hair.

Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown;
He rais’d a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.

Love is lord of all, and is in all the same.

Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.

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

Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.

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.

They say everything in the world is good for something.

It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more. ...But since every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.

What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

So easie still it proves in Factious Times,
With publick Zeal to cancel private Crimes:
How safe is Treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the Peoples Will:
Where Crouds can wink; and no offence be known,
Since in anothers guilt they find their own.

Whatever is, is in its causes just.