Quote

If you succeed not, cast not away the quills yet, nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk, but bring all to the forge and file again turn it new.

Ben Jonson

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Ben Jonson
Age: 65 †
Born: 1572
Born: June 21
Died: 1637
Died: August 6
Actor
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
City of Westminster
Benjamin Jonson
Beats
Scratches
Succeed
Files
Turn
Desk
Bring
Desks
Turns
Crafts
Quills
Poor
Cast
Forge
Away
Casts
File
Beat
Scratch

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All discourses but my own afflict me they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome
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I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.
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Blueness doth express trueness.
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Out of clothes out of countenance, out of countenance out of wit.
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Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps, doth die And this security, It is the common moth, That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.
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Confound these ancestors... They've stolen our best ideas!
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In the hope to meet Shortly again, and make our absence sweet.
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The soul of man is infinite in what it covets.
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Your highest female grace is silence.
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Passions are spiritual rebels and raise sedition against the understanding.
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Force works on servile natures, not the free.
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I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth.
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We are persons of quality, I assure you, and women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen.
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If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being a good poet without first being a good man.
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Tell troth and shame the devil.
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