Inspirational Quotes by John Selden

“If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”

“...the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”

“...music, I say, the most divine striker of the senses...”

“Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness.”

“So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante’s Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.”

“With a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince and country.”

“Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.”

“For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.”

“But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chess-men; and yet, me thinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.”

“Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.”

“Who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught?”

“Preachers say: do as I say, not what I do”

“The happiness of married life depends upon making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness.”

“Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.”

“He that will keep a monkey, should pay for the glasses he breaks.”

“When men comfort themselves with philosophy, 'tis not because they have got two or three sentences, but because they have digested those sentences, and made them their own: philosophy is nothing but discretion.”

“Prayer should be short, without giving God Almighty reasons why he should grant this, or that; he knows best what is good for us.”

“They that cry down moral honesty, cry down that which is a great part of my religion, my duty toward God, and my duty toward man. What care I to see a man run after a sermon, if he cozens and cheats as soon as he comes home. On the other side, morality must not be without religion; for if so, it may change, as I see convenience.”

“Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up dignity. In gluttony there must be eating, in drunkenness there must be drinking; 'tis not the eating, and 'tis not the drinking that must be blamed, but the excess. So in pride.”

“Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another.”