William Congreve Quotes

I nauseate walking; 'tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

To converse with Scandal is to play at Losing Loadum, you must lose a good name to him, before you can win it for yourself.

If happiness in self-content is placed, The wise are wretched, and fools only blessed.

Defer not till to-morrow to be wise, To-morrow's Sun to thee may never rise; Or should to-morrow chance to cheer thy sight With her enlivening and unlook'd for light, How grateful will appear her dawning rays! As favours unexpected doubly please.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Would any thing but a madman complain of uncertainty? Uncertainty and expectation are joys of life; security is an insipid thing; and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

Say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved.

O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell.

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt, or of ill breeding.

Music alone with sudden charms can bind The wand'ring sense, and calm the troubled mind.

I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull.

But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.

I came up stairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar.

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

If there's delight in love, 'Tis when I see that heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.

There is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh ... 'tis such a vulgar expression of the passion!

Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.

Whoever is king, is also the father of his country.

How hard a thing 'twould be to please you all.

There are times when sense may be unseasonable, as well as truth.

Marriage is honourable, as you say; and if so, wherefore should Cuckoldom be a Discredit, being deriv'd from so honourable a Root?

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand, Which, to admire, we should not understand

O, nothing is more alluring than a levee from a couch in some confusion.

To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.

A little scorn is alluring.

Love's but a frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined.

Women like flames have a destroying power; never to be quenched till they themselves devour.

Some by experience find those words mis-placed: At leisure married, they repent in haste.

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.

O ay, letters - I had letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why - they serve one to pin up one's hair.

One minute gives invention to destroy; What to rebuild, will a whole age employ.

Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.

Beauty is the lover's gift.