75 Quotes by Jeremy Collier

Dangerous principles impose upon our understanding, emasculate our spirits, and spoil our temper.

By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's pre-existence.

What sun is there within us that shoots his rays with so sudden a vigor? To see the soul flash in the face at this rate one would think would convert an atheist. By the way, we may observe that smiles are much more becoming than frowns. This seems a natural encouragement to good-humor; as much as to say, if people have a mind to be handsome, they must not be peevish and untoward.

Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage.

Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.

He that would relish success to a purpose should keep his passions cool, and his expectations low; and then it is possible that his fortune might exceed his fancy; for an advantage always rises by surprise; and is almost always doubled by being unlooked for.

It is a difficult task to talk to the purpose, and to put life and perspicuity into our discourse.

Modesty was designed by Providence as a guard to virtue, and that it might be always at hand it is wrought into the mechanism of the body. It is likewise proportioned to the occasions of life, and strongest in youth when passion is so too.

A man by tumbling his thoughts, and forming them into expressions, gives them a new fermentation, which works them into a finer body.