Top 15 John Webster Quotes

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

Heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits.

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
Their life, a general mist of error,
Their death, a hideous storm of terror.

Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near have neither heat nor light.

Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.

But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But look'd too near have neither heat nor light.

Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?
So may you blame some fair and crystal river
For that some melancholic, distracted man
Hath drown'd himself in 't.

'T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.

I dare truly and boldly say, that one years exercise therein to ingenious spirits, under able Masters, will produce more real and true fruit, than the studying Aristotelian Philosophy hath brought forth in many centuries. O that the Schools therefore would leave their idle, and fruitless speculations, and not be too proud to put their hands to the coals and furnace, where they might find ocular experiments to confute their fopperies, and produce effects that would be beneficial to all posterities.

Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

I saw him going the way of all flesh.