Quotes from John Dryden

Lord of yourself, uncumber'd with a wife.

With ravish'd earsThe monarch hears;Assumes the god,Affects to nod,And seems to shake the spheres.

They say everything in the world is good for something.

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

Made still a blund'ring kind of melody;Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in.Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,And in one word, heroically mad.

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate,And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate.

He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.

Jealousy is the jaundice of the soul.

What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

War is the trade of Kings.

Much malice mingled with a little wit.

For every inch that is not fool is rogue.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,But Shadwell never deviates into sense.Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,Strike through and make a lucid interval;But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,His rising fogs prevail upon the day.

Better one suffer, than a nation grieve.

All empire is no more than power in trust.

Sigh'd and look'd, and sigh'd again.

I am as free as Nature first made man,Ere the base laws of servitude began,When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

Wit will shineThrough the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

He rais'd a mortal to the skies,She drew an angel down.

The trumpet's loud clangorExcites us to arms.

And kind as kings upon their coronation day.

And, like another Helen, fir'd another Troy.

In friendship false, implacable in hate,Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.

A man so various that he seem'd to beNot one, but all mankind's epitome:Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;Was everything by starts, and nothing long:But, in the course of one revolving moon,Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.