John Ford (dramatist) (1586 – 1640)
One of the last English playwrights in the great Jacobean school that produced Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Jonson.
Let them fear bondage who are slaves to fear;
The sweetest freedom is an honest heart.
Busy opinion is an idle fool.
Flattery
Is monstrous in a true friend.
There is a place,
List, daughter! in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires;
A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths.
Nice philosophy
May tolerate unlikely arguments,
But heaven admits no jest.
We can drink till all look blue.
He is a noble gentleman; withal
Happy in his endeavours: the general voice
Sounds him for courtesy, behaviour, language,
And every fair demeanour, an example:
Titles of honour add not to his worth;
Who is himself an honour to his title.
I have spent
Many a silent night in sighs and groans,
Ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate,
Reasoned against the reasons of my love,
Done all that smoothed-cheek Virtue could advise,
But found all bootless: 'tis my destiny
That you must either love, or I must die.
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth,
Life's paradise, great princess, the soul's quiet,
Sinews of concord, earthly immortality,
Eternity of pleasures; no restoratives
Like to a constant woman!
Oh, happy kings,
Whose thrones are raised in their subjects' hearts.
Delay in vengeance gives a heavier blow.
I am, gay creature,
With pardon of your deities, a mushroom
On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then.
Her words are trusty heralds to her mind.
Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men's bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.
A bachelor
May thrive by observation, on a little.
A single life's no burden: but to draw
In yokes is chargeable, and will require
A double maintenance.
Love is dead; let lovers' eyes
Locked in endless dreams
Th' extreme of all extremes
Ope no more, for now Love dies.
Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.
He hath shook hands with time.