William Cowper Quotes
-
The slaves of custom and established mode, With pack-horse constancy we keep the road Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, True to the jingling of our leader's bells.
-
Did Charity prevail, the press would prove A vehicle of virtue, truth, and love.
-
Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.
-
Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat, To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the Great Babel, and not feel the crowd.
-
Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men; Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
-
Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, Delightful industry enjoy'd at home, An Nature, in her cultivated trim Dress'ed to his taste, inviting him abroad - Can he want occupation who has these?
-
What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd! How sweet their memory still! But they have left an aching void The world can never fill.
-
Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon their knees.
-
All constraint, / Except what wisdom lays on evil men, / Is evil.
-
Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.
-
Fanaticism, the false fire of an overheated mind.
-
An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.
-
Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees, Rock'd in the cradle of the western breeze.
-
[My kitten] is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know you will delight in her.
-
Misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another's case.
-
No traveler e'er reached that blest abode who found not thorns and briers in his road.
-
Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.
-
They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.
-
Lived in his saddle, loved the chase, the course, And always, ere he mounted, kiss'd his horse.
-
All affectation; 'tis my perfect scorn; Object of my implacable disgust.
-
Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.
-
Learning itself, received into a mind By nature weak, or viciously inclined, Serves but to lead philosophers astray, Where children would with ease discern the way.
-
The beggarly last doit.
-
Whoever keeps an open ear For tattlers will be sure to hear The trumpet of contention.