Top 200 William Cowper Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Great offices will have great talents, and God gives to every man the virtue, temper, understanding, taste, that lifts him into life, and lets him fall just in the niche he was ordained to fill.”

— William Cowper

152. “It chills my blood to hear the blest Supreme Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.”

— William Cowper

153. “The few that pray at all pray oft amiss.”

— William Cowper

154. “How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.”

— William Cowper

155. “Some to the fascination of a name, Surrender judgment hoodwinked.”

— William Cowper

156. “The rich are too indolent, the poor too weak, to bear the insupportable fatigue of thinking.”

— William Cowper

157. “How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once – through inexperience, as we now perceive – we missed that happiness we might have found!”

— William Cowper

158. “An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path. But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will turn aside and let the reptile live.”

— William Cowper

159. “The only amarantine flower on earth Is virtue.”

— William Cowper

160. “The things that mount the rostrum with a skip, And then skip down again, pronounce a text, Cry hem; and reading what they never wrote Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work, And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!”

— William Cowper

161. “The man to solitude accustom’d long, Perceives in everything that lives a tongue; Not animals alone, but shrubs and trees Have speech for him, and understood with ease, After long drought when rains abundant fall, He hears the herbs and flowers rejoicing all.”

— William Cowper

162. “Thieves at home must hang; but he that puts Into his overgorged and bloated purse The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.”

— William Cowper

163. “Strength may wield the ponderous spade, May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home; But elegance, chief grace the garden shows, And most attractive, is the fair result Of thought, the creature of a polished mind.”

— William Cowper

164. “Ye therefore who love mercy, teach your sons to love it, too.”

— William Cowper

165. “It is a general rule of Judgment, that a mischief should rather be admitted than an inconvenience.”

— William Cowper

166. “Spare feast! a radish and an egg.”

— William Cowper

167. “All truth is precious, if not all divine; and what dilates the powers must needs refine.”

— William Cowper

168. “Sin let loose speaks punishment at hand.”

— William Cowper

169. “Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.”

— William Cowper

170. “Greece, sound, thy Homer’s, Rome thy Virgil’s name, But England’s Milton equals both in fame.”

— William Cowper

171. “Could he with reason murmur at his case, Himself sole author of his own disgrace?”

— William Cowper

172. “Perhaps thou gav’st me, though unseen, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss.”

— William Cowper

173. “Good sense, good health, good conscience, and good fame, – all these belong to virtue, and all prove that virtue has a title to your love.”

— William Cowper

174. “Gardening imparts an organic perspective on the passage of time.”

— William Cowper

175. “Books are not seldom talismans and spells.”

— William Cowper

176. “If a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man that despises them is no contemptible one.”

— William Cowper

177. “No traveler e’er reached that blest abode who found not thorns and briers in his road.”

— William Cowper

178. “Call’d to the temple of impure delight He that abstains, and he alone, does right. If a wish wander that way, call it home; He cannot long be safe whose wishes roam.”

— William Cowper

179. “But truths on which depends our main concern, That ’tis our shame and misery not to learn, Shine by the side of every path we tread With such a lustre he that runs may read.”

— William Cowper

180. “Mercy to him that shows it, is the rule.”

— William Cowper

181. “But animated nature sweeter still, to soothe and satisfy the human ear.”

— William Cowper

182. “Stamps God’s own name upon a lie just made, To turn a penny in the way of trade.”

— William Cowper

183. “Events of all sorts creep or fly exactly as God pleases.”

— William Cowper

184. “No wild enthusiast could rest, till half the world like him was possessed.”

— William Cowper

185. “But conversation, choose what theme we may, And chiefly when religion leads the way, Should flow, like waters after summer show’rs, Not as if raised by mere mechanic powers.”

— William Cowper

186. “No one was ever scolded out of their sins.”

— William Cowper

187. “Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier’s purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr’d, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.”

— William Cowper

188. “We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree.”

— William Cowper

189. “Hast thou not learnd what thou art often told, A truth still sacred, and believed of old, That no success attends on spears and swords Unblest, and that the battle is the Lords?”

— William Cowper

190. “Ten thousand casks, Forever dribbling out their base contents, Touch’d by the Midas finger of the state, Bleed gold for ministers to sport away. Drink, and be mad then; ’tis your country bids!”

— William Cowper

191. “The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.”

— William Cowper

192. “That good diffused may more abundant grow.”

— William Cowper

193. “He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.”

— William Cowper

194. “A fretful temper will divide the closest knot that may be tied, by ceaseless sharp corrosion; a temper passionate and fierce may suddenly your joys disperse at one immense explosion.”

— William Cowper

195. “But still remember, if you mean to please, To press your point with modesty and ease.”

— William Cowper

196. “Far happier are the dead methinks than they who look for death and fear it every day.”

— William Cowper

197. “Folly ends where genuine hope begins.”

— William Cowper

198. “Heaven speed the canvas, gallantly unfurl’d, To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the Pole the produce of the sun, And knit the unsocial climates into one.”

— William Cowper

199. “Where thou art gone, adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.”

— William Cowper

200. “When was public virtue to be found when private was not?”

— William Cowper