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John Dryden: 392 quotes21 likes

“Your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.”

John Dryden The Maiden Queen

The Maiden Queen, Act i, scene 2.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Thespis, the first professor of our art,
At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.”

Prologue to Lee's Sophonisba.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Joy rul'd the day, and Love the night.”

John Dryden book Fables, Ancient and Modern

Source: Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), The Secular Masque (1700), Line 82.

“A brave man scorns to quarrel once a day;
Like Hectors in at every petty fray.”

John Dryden All for Love

Prologue
All for Love (1678)

“Lord of yourself, uncumbered with a wife.”

Epistle to John Driden of Chesterton (1700), line 18.

“And, like another Helen, fir'd another Troy.”

Source: Alexander’s Feast http://www.bartleby.com/40/265.html (1697), l. 154.

“T' abhor the makers, and their laws approve,
Is to hate traitors and the treason love.”

John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther

Pt. III, lines 706–707.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

“All, all of a piece throughout:
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.”

John Dryden book Fables, Ancient and Modern

Source: Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), The Secular Masque (1700), Lines 86–91.

“Milton's Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.”

Preface to Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace, in Sylvæ: or, The second part of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Mr. Dryden, third edition (London, 1702).

“Like you, an alien in a land unknown,
I learn to pity woes so like my own.”

Aeneis, Book I, lines 889–890.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

“Above any Greek or Roman name.”

Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, line 76. Compare: "Above all Greek, above all Roman fame"; Alexander Pope, Epistle I, Book 2, line 26.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“… not judging truth to be in nature better than falsehood, but setting a value upon both according to interest.”

"Plutarch's Lives," Vol 1, Barnes & Noble Inc., 2006, Lysander p. 646
Translation from Greek originalː "τὸ ἀληθὲς οὐ φύσει τοῦ ψεύδους κρεῖττον ἡγούμενος, ἀλλ' ἑκατέρου τῇ χρείᾳ τὴν τιμὴν ὁρίζων."

“Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers
Is reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky
Not light us here, so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day:
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows reason at religion's sight,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.”

John Dryden book Religio Laici

Religio Laici (1682).

“Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?”

Aeneis, Book I, lines 17–18.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

“So over violent, or over civil,
That every man with him was God or Devil.”

John Dryden book The Hind and the Panther

Absalom and Achitophel. Part i. Line 557.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

“The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.”

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 19–24.

“Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long —
Even wondered at, because he dropped no sooner.
Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years,
Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more;
Till like a clock worn out with eating time,
The wheels of weary life at last stood still.”

Act IV, scene i.
Œdipus (1679)

“Nor can his blessed soul look down from heaven,
Or break the eternal sabbath of his rest.”

Act V, scene 2.
The Spanish Friar (1681)

“By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art,
Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow.”

John Dryden Annus Mirabilis

Annus Mirabilis (1667), stanza 155.

“The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound;
Whose dire effects the Grecian army found,
And many a hero, king, and hardy knight,
Were sent, in early youth, to shades of night.”

John Dryden book Fables, Ancient and Modern

The First Book of Homer's Ilias
Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700)