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Ambition is the mind's immodesty.

William Davenant

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William Davenant
Age: 62 †
Born: 1606
Born: February 1
Died: 1668
Died: April 7
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Immodesty
Ambition
Mind

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Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.
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Honor is the moral conscience of the great.
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The assembled souls of all that men held wise.
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It is the wit and policy of sin to hate those we have abused.
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All slander must still be strangled in its birth, or time will soon conspire to make it strong enough to overcome the truth.
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Think not ambition wise, because 't is brave.
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All jealousy must be strangled in its birth.
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Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run.
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Be not with honor's gilded baits beguil'd, Nor think ambition wise, because 'tis brave For though we like it, as a forward child, 'Tis so unsound, her cradle is the grave.
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Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.
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O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave, The wise expect, the sorrowful invite, And all the good embrace, who know the grave A short dark passage to eternal light.
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What one cannot, another can.
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Generous souls Are still most subject to credulity.
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Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.
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Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road.
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Small are the seeds fate does unheeded sow Of slight beginnings to important ends.
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Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase By eating, and it fears to starve, unless It still may feed, and all it sees devour Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.
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How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.
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For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught To be contented with the least.
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Go! dive into the Southern Sea, and when Th'ast found, to trouble the nice sight of men, A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth, Give it Endymion's love, whose ev'ry tear Would more enrich the skilful jeweller.
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