The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (453 page)
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Authors: Elizabeth Knowles
c.
1580–1625
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.
The Devil's Law-Case
(1623) act 5, sc. 4
O, that it were possible,
We might but hold some two days' conference
With the dead!
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 4, sc. 2
I am Duchess of Malfi still.
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 4, sc. 2
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits.
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 4, sc. 2. ,
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 4, sc. 2
Strangling is a very quiet death.
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 5, sc. 4
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.
The Duchess of Malfi
(1623) act 5, sc. 4
'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.
The White Devil
(1612) act 1, sc. 2
A mere tale of a tub, my words are idle.
The White Devil
(1612) act 2, sc. 1
Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
The White Devil
(1612) act 5, sc. 4
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
The White Devil
(1612) act 5, sc. 4
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither.
The White Devil
(1612) act 5, sc. 6
I have caught
An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably.
The White Devil
(1612) act 5, sc. 6
1730–95
Am I not a man and a brother.
legend on Wedgwood cameo, depicting a kneeling Negro slave in chains
reproduced in facsimile in E. Darwin
The Botanic Garden
pt. 1 (1791)
1909–43
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
La Pesanteur et la grâce
(1948)
What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.
W. H. Auden
A Certain World
(1971)
1908–2002
It was absolutely marvellous working for Pauli. You could ask him anything. There was no worry that he would think a particular question was stupid, since he thought
all
questions were stupid.
in
American Journal of Physics
1977
1904–84
Me Tarzan, you Jane.
summing up his role in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932 film)
in
Photoplay Magazine
June 1932; the words do not occur in the film or in the original novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs