William Congreve Quotes (73 Quotes)

These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass.

Every man plays the fool once in his life, but to marry is playing the fool all one's life long.

Say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved.

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words.

Believe it, Men have ever been the same,And all the Golden Age is but a Dream.

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.

Careless she is with artful care, Affecting to seem unaffected.

No, I'm no enemy to learning; it hurts not me.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Wou'd I were free from this restraint, Or else had hopes to win her Wou'd she cou'd make me a saint, Or I of her a sinner

Yes, but tenderness becomes me best - a sort of dyingness - you see that picture has a sort of a - ha, Foible A swimmingness in the eyes.

I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt, or of ill breeding.

'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants.

You are all camphire and frankincense, all chastity and odour.

He that first cries out stop thief, is often he that has stolen the treasure.

Never go to bed angry, stay up and fight.

Courtship is to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

I hope you do not think me prone to an iteration of nuptials.