Quotes to inspire and reflect

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, Fallen from his high estate, And welt’ring in his blood; Deserted, at his utmost need, By those his former bounty fed, On the bare earth expos’d he lies, With not a friend to close his eyes.

Sound the trumpets; beat the drums… Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes.

And seems to shake the spheres.

None but the brave deserves the fair.

Arms, and the man I sing, 8 who, forced by fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate.

Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

This is the porcelain clay of humankind. 6

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d; 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.

T’ abhor the makers, and their laws approve, Is to hate traitors and the treason love.

Possess your soul with patience.

For present joys are more to flesh and blood Than a dull prospect of a distant good.

Much malice mingled with a little wit.

Of all the tyrannies on human kind The worst is that which persecutes the mind.

And kind as kings upon their coronation day.

The trumpet shall be heard on high The dead shall live, the living die, And Music shall untune the sky!

The soft complaining flute, In dying notes, discovers The woes of hopeless lovers.

The trumpet’s loud clangor Excites us to arms.

What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And Music’s power obey. From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.

O gracious God! how far have we Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!

Since heaven’s eternal year is thine.

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.

Not heaven itself upon the past has power; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.

All human things are subject to decay, And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, But Shadwell 5 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.

And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow.

There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know. 3

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.

For every inch that is not fool is rogue.

Of ancient race by birth, but nobler yet In his own worth.

Nor is the people’s judgment always true: The most may err as grossly as the few.

His tribe were God Almighty’s gentlemen.

So over violent, or over civil, That every man with him was God or Devil.

Who think too little, and who talk too much.

A man so various that he seem’d to be Not 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.

All empire is no more than power in trust.

Better one suffer, than a nation grieve.

And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeather’d two-legg’d thing, a son.

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

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease.

Whate’er he did was done with so much ease, In him alone, ’twas natural to please.

Your Cleopatra; Dolabella’s Cleopatra; every man’s Cleopatra.

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin.

The wretched have no friends.