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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Ben Jonson

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Ben Jonson

A certain degree of soul is indispensable to save us the expense of salt.

A good king is a public servant.

An innocent man needs no eloquence; his innocence is instead of it.

Bad men excuse their faults; good men will leave them.

Care that has enter’d once into the breast, / Will have the whole possession ere it rest.

Cut men’s throats with whisperings.

Drink to me only with thine eyes, / And I will pledge with mine; / Or leave a kiss but in the cup, / And I’ll not look for wine.

Fear to do base, unworthy things is valour; / If they be done to us, to surfer them / Is valour too.

Give me a look, give me a face, / That makes simplicity a grace, / Robes loosely flowing, hair as free; / Such sweet neglect more taketh me, / Than all the adulteries of art; / They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times.

Great honours are great burdens; but on whom / They’re cast with envy, he doth bear two loads.

He that has been taught only by himself has had a fool for a master.

He was not of an age, but for all Time, / Sweet Swan of Avon.

His thoughts look through his words.

Ill fortune never crushes that man whom good fortune deceived not.

In small proportion we just beauties see, / And in short measures life may perfect be.

It will never out of the flesh that’s bred in the bone.

Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee.

Laugh and be fat.

Learning needs rest; sovereignty gives it. Sovereignty needs counsel; learning affords it.

Let not your sail be bigger than your boat.

Let them call it mischief; / When it is past and prosper’d it will be virtue.

No greater hell than to be a slave to fear.

No man can be a good poet without first being a good man.

No man can be a poet / That is not a good cook, to know the palates / and several tastes of the time.

Of all wild beasts, preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer.

Small Latin and less Greek.Of Shakespeare’s knowledge.

Sweet Swan of Avon.Of Shakespeare.

Talking is the disease of age.

The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike, / One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.

When affliction thunders over our roofs, to hide our heads and run into our graves shows us no men, but makes us fortune’s slaves.