Quotes from William Davenant

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase By eating, and it fears to starve, unless It still may feed, and all it sees devour; Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.

All jealousy must be strangled in its birth.

Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.

Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.

All slander must still be strangled in its birth, or time will soon conspire to make it strong enough to overcome the truth.

Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

Anger is blood, poured and perplexed into froth; but malice is the wisdom of our wrath.

For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught To be contented with the least.

O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave, The wise expect, the sorrowful invite, And all the good embrace, who know the grave A short dark passage to eternal light.

Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road.

Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.