1630s

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 6.9

Play · Tragicomedy

Pierre Corneille

Le Cid · 1636

★ 6.9

Religious literature

Whether a Million of Angels may not sit upon a needle's point?

William Chillingworth

1637

★ 6.9

Sermon

We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are on us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

John Winthrop

1630

★ 6.9

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.

His bark is worse than his bite.

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 5.4

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 5.3

Galileo Galilei

1638

★ 5.3

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

1631

★ 3.7

The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries-in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts.

We must bear one another's burdens, we must not look only on our own things but also on the things of our brethren.

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 3.7

Sermon

John Winthrop

1630

★ 3.6

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.

1631

★ 3.6

Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge.

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 3.6

Yet where an equal poise of hope and fear Does arbitrate the event, my nature is That I incline to hope rather than fear, And gladly banish squint suspicion.

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 3.6

Play · Masque (play)

John Milton

1634

★ 3.6

So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled Ore, Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

John Milton

1638

★ 3.6

Personal journal

Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.

William Bradford

Of Plymouth Plantation · 1630

★ 3.5

A mighty pain to love it is, And 'tis a pain that pain to miss; But of all pains the greatest pain It is to love, but love in vain.

Abraham Cowley

1633

★ 3.5

For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

Outlandish Proverbs · 1633

★ 3.5

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, When once it is within thee.

The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633

★ 3.5

The road to resolution lies by doubt: The next way home's the farthest way about.

Francis Quarles

Emblems · 1635

★ 3.5

We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil; We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.

Francis Quarles

1635

★ 3.5

Play

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is of slight worth, as all life is a dream, and dreams are dreams.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Life is a Dream · 1635

★ 3.5

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing.

What hath night to do with sleep?

1633

★ 3.5

John Milton

Comus · 1634

★ 2.1

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 2.1

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

Discourse on Method · 1637

★ 2.1

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant, The only harmless great thing.

When love is not madness, it is not love.

1633

★ 2.0

Play

Pedro Calderon de la Barca

1637

★ 2.0

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Songs and Sonnets · 1631

★ 1.9

Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee. As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, To taste whole joys.

The best mirror is an old friend.

The Harmony of the Muses · 1631

★ 1.9

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth three after.

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 1.9

Jacula Prudentum · 1633

★ 1.9

Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart Could have recover'd greennesse?

The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633

★ 1.9

Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations · 1633

★ 1.9

Ben Jonson

1637

★ 1.9

All kings, and all their favourites, All glory of honours, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times as they pass, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw. All other things to their destruction draw; Only our love hath no decay; This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday; Running it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.