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Hope! fortune's cheating lottery when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

Abraham Cowley

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Abraham Cowley
Age: 49 †
Born: 1618
Born: January 1
Died: 1667
Died: July 28
Essayist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
the City
Blanks
Lottery
Cheating
Prize
Fortune
Hundred
Hope

More quotes by Abraham Cowley

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Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.
Abraham Cowley
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The getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey.
Abraham Cowley
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To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city to be a philosopher, from the world or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's.
Abraham Cowley
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This only grant me, that my means may lie, too low for envy, for contempt to high.
Abraham Cowley
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Life for delays and doubts no time does give, None ever yet made haste enough to live.
Abraham Cowley
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There have been fewer friends on earth than kings.
Abraham Cowley
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Thus would I double my life's fading spaceFor he that runs it well, runs twice his race.
Abraham Cowley
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His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong his life, I'm sure, was in the right.
Abraham Cowley
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Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
Abraham Cowley
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Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.
Abraham Cowley
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A mighty pain to love it is, And 'tis a pain that pain to miss But, of all pains, the greatest pain Is to love, but love in vain.
Abraham Cowley
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The Sunflow'r, thinking 'twas for him foul shame To nap by daylight, strove t' excuse the blame It was not sleep that made him nod, he said, But too great weight and largeness of his head.
Abraham Cowley
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But what is woman? Only one of nature's agreeable blunders.
Abraham Cowley
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God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.
Abraham Cowley
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I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that ... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature.
Abraham Cowley
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Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise, He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river's bank expecting stay, Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone, That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on.
Abraham Cowley
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We may talk what we please, he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms.
Abraham Cowley
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Nay, in death's hand, the grape-stone proves As strong as thunder is in Jove's.
Abraham Cowley
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All this world's noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy!
Abraham Cowley
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It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader's ear to hear anything of praise from him.
Abraham Cowley