John Webster Quotes

We had need to borrow that fantastic glass,invented by Galileo the Florentine
To view another spacious world in the moon
and look to find a constant woman there

Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow'rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
Let holy Church receive him duly,
Since he paid the church-tithes truly.

I am Duchess of Malfi still.

For all our wit and reading brings us to a truer sense of sorrow.

See, a good habit makes a child a man, Whereas a bad one makes a man a beast.

If all my royal kindred
Lay in my way unto this marriage,
I'ld make them my low foot-steps

A powerful portfolio of physiological and behavioural evidence now exists to support the case that fish feel pain and that this feeling matters. In the face of such evidence, any argument to the contrary based on the claim that fish 'do not have the right sort of brain' can no longer be called scientific. It is just obstinate.

Knowledge Is Power! Train smart and obtain power!

Imyself haveheard averygood jest, and havescornedto seem to have so sillya wit as to understand it.

The soul was never put in the body to stand still.

Are you out of your princely wits?
What's he? Let me have his beard sawed off and his eyebrows filed more civil!

Ha, ha, ha, thou entanglest thyself in thine own work like a silkworm.

The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes with the sword of justice.

Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try:
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.

We endure the strokes like anvils or hard steel,
Till pain itself make us no pain to feel.

Integrity of life is fame's best friend,
Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways: any way, for heaven-sake

The chiefest action for a man of great spirit is never to be out of action ... the soul was never put into the body to stand still.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust

See, the curse of children! In life they keep us frequently in tears, And in the cold grave leave us in pale fears.

O me, this place is hell.

Pull and pull strongly for your able strength / Must pull down heaven upon me

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.

Though lust do masque in ne'er so strange disguise she's oft found witty, but is never wise.

DUCHESS: Diamonds are of most value,
They say, that have past through most jewellers' hands.
FERDINAND: Whores, by that rule, are precious.

A politician is the devil's quilted anvil; He fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard.

Think't the best voyage that e'er you made like an irregular crab which, though't goes backward, thinks that it goes right, because it goes its own way.

All the damnable degrees Of drinking have you staggered through.

Lust carries her sharp whip At her own girdle.

Poor maids have more lovers than husbands.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

There's no resolution to the conflicts of our lives within ourselves, no freedom from wickedness to be sought in striving, no peace with God which is the fruit of moral effort. And the reason why there is none is that we are, indeed, defeated by sin. It's not that we're occasionally overcome, or even that more often than not we lose the battle with ourselves. It's that we're wholly defeated, ruined, "there is no health in us." To look to ourselves, therefore, to try to sort ourselves out by doing an audit of our moral lives or a clean-up operation on our spirituality is, quite literally, a hopeless undertaking.

That realm is never long in quiet, where the ruler is a soldier.

Sometimes the Devil doth preach.

And great men do great good, or else great harm.

Lovers die inward that their flames conceal.

Right! There are plots.
Your beauty! Oh, ten thousand curses on 't!
How long have I beheld the devil in crystal!
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice,
With music, and with fatal yokes of flowers,
To my eternal ruin. Woman to man
Is either a god, or a wolf.

All things do help the unhappy man to fall.

I myself have loved a lady and pursued her with a great deal of under-age protestation, whom some three or four gallants that have enjoyed would with all their hearts have been glad to have been rid of. 'Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.

Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.

Condemn you me for that the duke did love me?
So may you blame some fair and crystal river,
For that some melancholic distracted man
Hath drowned himself in't.

Black-birds fatten best in hard weather

Fortune's a right whore:
If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,
That she may take away all at one swoop.

You know what whore is. Next the devil adultery,
Enters the devil murder.

Man is most happy, when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue.

Let guilty men remember, their black deeds
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds.

Is not old wine wholesomest, old pippins toothsomest, old wood burn brightest, old linen wash whitest? Old soldiers, sweethearts, are surest, and old lovers are soundest.

In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air.

For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom.

Vain the ambition of kings Who seek by trophies and dead things To leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind.

Oh, yes, thy sins Do run before thee to fetch fire from hell, To light thee thither.

Love mixed with fear is sweetness.

'Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

The basic rule for thinking about faith is this: What matters about faith is not us, but the object of faith. Faith isn't primarily a power or capacity in me; it isn't first and foremost an attitude which I adopt; indeed, it's not first of all something which I do. Faith is objective - that is, faith is wholly turned outward to the object of faith. In a real sense, it's not faith itself but that toward which faith is turned that is critically important in getting our thinking straight. What matters about faith is therefore not us but God, the object of faith. But

How tedious is a guilty conscience!

I have long served virtue, And never ta'en wages of her.

When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.

O that I were a man, or that I had power

To execute my apprehended wishes!

I would whip some with scorpions.

Physicians are like kings- They brook no contradiction.

What a strange creature is a laughing fool,
As if a man were created to no use
But only to show his teeth.

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness.

Through the Spirit, Jesus Christ the exalted one generates a new mode of common human life, the life of the Church. To participate in that common human life, hearing the gospel in fellowship under the word of God and living together under the signs of baptism and the Lord's supper, is to exist in a sphere in which God's limitless power is unleashed and extends into the entirety of human life: moral, political, cultural, affective, intellectual. Reason, like everything else, is remade in the sphere of the Church; and theological reason is an activity of the regenerate mind turned towards the gospel of Jesus Christ, which constitutes the Church's origin and vocation.

What's a whore? She's like the guilty counterfeited coin Which whosoe're first stamps it brings in trouble all that receive it.

We are merely the stars tennis-balls, struck and bandied which way please them.

Woman to man Is either a God or a wolfe.

As in this world there are degrees of evils,
So in this world there are degrees of devils.

When a man's mind rides faster than his horse can gallop they quickly both tire.