C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

John Ford

He is a noble gentleman; withal

Happy in ’s endeavours: the gen’ral voice

Sounds him for courtesy, behaviour, language,

And ev’ry fair demeanour, an example:

Titles of honour add not to his worth;

Who is himself an honour to his title.

Melancholy

Is not, as you conceive, indisposition

Of body, but the mind’s disease.

Oh, happy kings,

Whose thrones are raised in their subjects’ hearts.

Sister, look ye,

How, by a new creation of my tailor’s

I’ve shook off old mortality.

The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth,

Life’s paradise, great princess, the soul’s quiet,

Sinews of concord, earthly immortality,

Eternity of pleasures.

There is a place in a black and hollow vault,

Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,

But flaming horror of consuming fires;

A lightless sulphur, chok’d with smoky fogs

Of an infected darkness; in this place

Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts

Of never dying deaths; there damn’d souls

Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed

With toads and adders; there is burning oil

Pour’d down the drunkard’s throat; the usurer

Is forc’d to sup whole draughts of molten gold;

There is the murderer forever stabb’d,

Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton

On racks of burning steel, while in his soul

He feels the torment of his raging lust;

There stand those wretched things,

Who have dream’d out whole years in lawless sheets,

And secret incests, cursing one another.

Affections injured by tyranny, or rigor of compulsion, like tempest-threatened trees, unfirmly rooted, never spring to timely growth.

Delay in vengeance gives a heavier blow.

Diamonds cut diamonds.

Her words are trusty heralds to her mind.

Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear; the sweetest freedom is an honest heart.

Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men’s bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.

Titles of honor add not to his worth, who is himself an honor to his title.