Quote

They fix attention, heedless of your pain, With oaths like rivets forced into the brain And e'en when sober truth prevails throughout, They swear it, till affirmance breeds a doubt.

William Cowper

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William Cowper
Age: 68 †
Born: 1731
Born: November 26
Died: 1800
Died: April 25
Hymnwriter
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Translator
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Truth
Swear
Like
Forced
Rivets
Throughout
Heedless
Till
Oaths
Doubt
Prevails
Brain
Breeds
Attention
Oath
Pain
Sober

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All truth is precious, if not all divine and what dilates the powers must needs refine.
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Did Charity prevail, the press would prove A vehicle of virtue, truth, and love.
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How! leap into the pit our life to save? To save our life leap all into the grave.
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Misses! the tale that I relate This lesson seems to carry-- Choose not alone a proper mate, But proper time to marry.
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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.
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Remorse, the fatal egg that pleasure laid.
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Nature is a good name for an effect whose cause is God.
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The Frenchman, easy, debonair, and brisk, Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, Is always happy, reign whoever may, And laughs the sense of mis'ry far away.
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A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun, It gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none.
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It is a general rule of Judgment, that a mischief should rather be admitted than an inconvenience.
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The bird that flutters least is longest on the wing.
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The slaves of custom and established mode, With pack-horse constancy we keep the road Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, True to the jingling of our leader's bells.
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What is it but a map of busy life, Its fluctuations, and its vast concerns?
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The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns The low'ring eye, the petulance, the frown, And sullen sadness, that o'ershade, distort, And mar the face of beauty, when no cause For such immeasurable woe appears These Flora banishes, and gives the fair Sweet smiles, and bloom less transient than her own.
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They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.
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I am out of humanity's reach.
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Visits are insatiable devourers of time, and fit only for those who, if they did not that, would do nothing.
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The only amarantine flower on earth Is virtue.
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And the tear that is wiped with a little address, May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.
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Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.
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