Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.
Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
He that visits the sick in hopes of a legacy, but is never so friendly in all other cases, I look upon him as being no better than a raven that watches a weak sheep only to peck out its eyes.
In nature all is managed for the best with perfect frugality and just reserve, profuse to none, but bountiful to all; never employing on one thing more than enough, but with exact economy retrenching the superfluous, and adding force to what is principal in everything.
'Tis a common proof, that lowliness is Edward Young ambition's ladder, where to the climber upwards turns his face; but when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks into the clouds scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.
Ambition's like a circle on the water, which never ceases to enlarge itself, 'till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shad
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel; in apprenhension, how like a god; the beauty of the world the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?
My business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy.
O, he sits high in all the people's hearts; And that which would appear offence in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes.
To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.
With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself.
Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
Those that are good manners at thecourt are as ridiculed in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable atthe court.
Down on your knees, and thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love. (<u>As You Like It</u>)