William Cowper Quotes

They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.

Fanaticism, the false fire of an overheated mind.

To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think.

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.

Trials make the promise sweet, Trials give new life to prayer; Trials bring me to His feet, Lay me low, and keep me there.

Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

The bird that flutters least is longest on the wing.

Built God a church and laughed His word to scorn.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

No one was ever scolded out of their sins.

The Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the truth to sight.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.

Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.

Grief is itself a medicine.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds.

Where thou art gone, adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.

The earth was made so various, that the mind Of desultory man, studious of change, And pleased with novelty, might be indulged.

Great offices will have great talents.

Tea - the cups that cheer but not inebriate.

A heretic, my dear sir, is a fellow who disagrees with you regarding something neither of you knows anything about.

We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.

Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.

Remorse begets reform.

The proud are ever most provoked by pride.

Elegant as simplicity, and warm As ecstasy.

All truth is precious, if not all divine; and what dilates the powers must needs refine.

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

Unmissed but by his dogs and by his groom.

Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.

Those flimsy webs that break as soon as wrought, attain not to the dignity of thought.

The parable of the prodigal son, the most beautiful fiction that ever was invented; our Saviour's speech to His disciples, with which He closed His earthly ministrations, full of the sublimest dignity and tenderest affection, surpass everything that I ever read; and like the spirit by which they were dictated, fly directly to the heart.

All we behold is miracle.

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume; And we are weeds without it.

If a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man that despises them is no contemptible one.

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys: Thy worst effect is banishing for hours The sex whose presence civilizes ours.

The solemn fop; significant and budge; A fool with judges, amongst fools a judge

Religion, richest favor of the skies.

I have a kitten,the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin.

Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, 'tis being flayed alive.

But animated nature sweeter still, to soothe and satisfy the human ear.

The Cross! There, and there only (though the deist rave, and the atheist, if Earth bears so base a slave); There and there only, is the power to save.

The beggarly last doit.

But still remember, if you mean to please, To press your point with modesty and ease.

Not to understand a treasure's worth till time has stole away the slighted good, is cause of half the poverty we feel, and makes the world the wilderness it is.

The man that hails you Tom or Jack, and proves by thumps upon your back how he esteems your merit, is such a friend, that one had need be very much his friend indeed to pardon or to bear it.

Strength may wield the ponderous spade, May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home; But elegance, chief grace the garden shows, And most attractive, is the fair result Of thought, the creature of a polished mind.