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Katherine Philips Quotes

Katherine or Catherine Philips , also known as "The Matchless Orinda", was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters. She achieved renown as a translator of Pierre Corneille's Pompée and Horace, and for her editions of poetry after her death. In 1663, her adaptation of Pompey was the first play with an English script to be given a professional staging by a woman. She was highly regarded by many significant writers of 17th century literature including John Dryden and John Keats as being influential in her writing, and ahead of her time. She is also significant in the literary community for her works inspired by her fervent inner relationships with other women, and the mystery surrounding those relationships that still lives to this day.

✵ 1. January 1632 – 22. June 1664
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Katherine Philips: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Katherine Philips Quotes

“Essential honour must be in a friend,
Not such as every breath fans to and fro;
But born within, is its own judge and end,
And dares not sin, though sure that none should know.
Where friendship's spoke, honesty's understood;
For none can be a friend that is not good.”

Katherine Philips

st. 6
Poem LXIV: 'A Friend

“Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame,
'Tis love refined and purged from all its dross,
The next to angel's love, if not the same,
As strong as passion is, though not so gross:
It antedates a glad eternity
And is an heaven in epitome.”

Katherine Philips

st. 2
Poem LXIV: 'A Friend

“I did but see him and he disappeared,
I did but pluck the rose-bud and it fell,
A sorrow unforeseen and scarcely feared,
For ill can mortals their afflictions spell.”

Katherine Philips

'On the Death of my First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips' (1655), as reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 575

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