Top 50 Abraham Cowley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.”

— Abraham Cowley

2. “For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.”

— Abraham Cowley

3. “Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.”

— Abraham Cowley

4. “Come, my best friends, my best books, and lead me on.”

— Abraham Cowley

5. “The present is an eternal now.”

— Abraham Cowley

6. “May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.”

— Abraham Cowley

7. “Life is an incurable disease.”

— Abraham Cowley

8. “Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.”

— Abraham Cowley

9. “What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own?”

— Abraham Cowley

10. “I would not fear nor wish my fate, but boldly say each night, to-morrow let my sun his beams display, or in clouds hide them; I have lived today.”

— Abraham Cowley

11. “God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.”

— Abraham Cowley

12. “But what is woman? Only one of nature’s agreeable blunders.”

— Abraham Cowley

13. “It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ear to hear anything of praise from him.”

— Abraham Cowley

14. “Gold begets in brethren hate; Gold in families debate; Gold does friendship separate; Gold does civil wars create.”

— Abraham Cowley

15. “Vain, weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise Up between two eternities!”

— Abraham Cowley

16. “Of all ills that one endures, hope is a cheap and universal cure.”

— Abraham Cowley

17. “Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!”

— Abraham Cowley

18. “The getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey.”

— Abraham Cowley

19. “Fill the bowl with rosy wine, around our temples roses twine, And let us cheerfully awhile, like wine and roses, smile.”

— Abraham Cowley

20. “Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.”

— Abraham Cowley

21. “Acquaintance I would have, but when it depends; not on number, but the choice of friends.”

— Abraham Cowley

22. “Man is too near all kinds of beasts, – a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture.”

— Abraham Cowley

23. “This only grant me, that my means may lie, too low for envy, for contempt to high.”

— Abraham Cowley

24. “I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a little feast...”

— Abraham Cowley

25. “Who lets slip fortune, her shall never find: Occasion once past by, is bald behind.”

— Abraham Cowley

26. “There have been fewer friends on earth than kings.”

— Abraham Cowley

27. “Neither the praise nor the blame is our own.”

— Abraham Cowley

28. “Hope! fortune’s cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!”

— Abraham Cowley

29. “Why to mute fish should’st thou thyself discoverAnd not to me, thy no less silent lover?”

— Abraham Cowley

30. “Poets by Death are conquer’d but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.”

— Abraham Cowley

31. “Stones of small worth may lie unseen by day, But night itself does the rich gem betray.”

— Abraham Cowley

32. “His time’s forever, everywhere his place.”

— Abraham Cowley

33. “Be kind and considerate with your criticism. It’s just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.”

— Abraham Cowley

34. “Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?”

— Abraham Cowley

35. “Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.”

— Abraham Cowley

36. “All this world’s noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy!”

— Abraham Cowley

37. “To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man’s, into the world, as it is God’s.”

— Abraham Cowley

38. “Plenty, as well as Want, can separate friends.”

— Abraham Cowley

39. “The Sunflow’r, thinking ‘twas for him foul shame To nap by daylight, strove t’ excuse the blame; It was not sleep that made him nod, he said, But too great weight and largeness of his head.”

— Abraham Cowley

40. “Ah! Wretched and too solitary he who loves not his own company.”

— Abraham Cowley

41. “All the world’s bravery that delights our eyes is but thy several liveries.”

— Abraham Cowley

42. “The monster London laugh at me.”

— Abraham Cowley

43. “Nothing so soon the drooping spirits can raise As praises from the men, whom all men praise.”

— Abraham Cowley

44. “Unbind the charms that in slight fables lie and teach that truth is truest poesy.”

— Abraham Cowley

45. “Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.”

— Abraham Cowley

46. “As for being much known by sight, and pointed out, I cannot comprehend the honor that lies withal; whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor.”

— Abraham Cowley

47. “The present is all the ready money Fate can give.”

— Abraham Cowley

48. “What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving or paying all kinds of ceremonies!”

— Abraham Cowley

49. “The world’s a scene of changes.”

— Abraham Cowley

50. “There is some help for all the defects of fortune; for, if a man cannot attain to the length of his wishes, he may have his remedy by cutting of them shorter.”

— Abraham Cowley