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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.

William Davenant

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William Davenant
Age: 62 †
Born: 1606
Born: February 1
Died: 1668
Died: April 7
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Children
Graves
Think
Brave
Thinking
Ambition
Baits
Like
Forward
Unsound
Honor
Gilded
Wise
Bait
Child
Cradle
Though
Grave

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Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run.
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Honor is the moral conscience of the great.
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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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Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.
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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 beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.
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Small are the seeds fate does unheeded sow Of slight beginnings to important ends.
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To be rich be diligent move on Like heav'ns great movers that enrich the earth Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone And make the spring straight bury all her birth. Rich are the diligent who can command Time--nature's stock.
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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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Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.
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Anger is blood, poured and perplexed into froth but malice is the wisdom of our wrath.
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Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.
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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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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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What one cannot, another can.
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For in a dearth of comforts, we art taught To be contented with the least.
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Ambition is the mind's immodesty.
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Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.
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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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