Thomas Dekker Quotes

A wise man poor
Is like a sacred book that’s never read,—
To himself he lives, and to all else seems dead.
This age thinks better of a gilded fool
Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.

BALTHAZAR: Sin is a raven croaking her own fall.

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
O punishment!

Turn over a new leaf.

ONAELIA: What sort of poets are there?
POET: Two sorts lady: The great poets and the small poets.
ONAELIA: Great and small! Which do you call the great? The fat ones?

BALTHAZAR: I have a private coat for Italian stilettos, I can be treacherous with the Walloon, drunk with the Dutch, a chimney-sweeper with the Irish, a gentleman with the Welsh and true arrant thief with the English. What then is my country to me?

We are ne’er like angels till our passion dies.

The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.

KING: I am full of thoughts,
A thousand wheels toss my incertain fears,
There is a storm in my hot boiling brains,
Which rises without wind. A horrid one.

ONAELIA:You are like common beadles, apt to lash
Almost to death poor wretches not worth striking,
But fawn with slavish flattery on damned vices
So great men act them. You clap hands at those,
Where the true poet indeed doth scorn to gild
A gaudy tomb with glory of his verse,
Which coffins stinking carrion.

This principle is old, but true as fate,—
Kings may love treason, but the traitor hate.

To add to golden numbers golden numbers.

BALTHAZAR: Subjects may stumble, when kings walk astray.
Thine acts shall be a new Apocrypha.

Honest labour bears a lovely face.

And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds,
There ’s a lean fellow beats all conquerors.