37 Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

Richard Brinsley Sheridan serves sharp, witty commentary on love and society that entertains the clever.

An apothecary should never be out of spirits.
#1
Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike-no bail, no demurrer.
#2
A life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line,-by deeds, not years.
#3
You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing's curst hard reading.
#4
An oyster may be crossed in love.
#5
The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
#6
'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.
#7
A progeny of learning.
#8
Never say more than is necessary.
#9
I know you are laughing in your sleeve.
#10
He is the very pineapple of politeness!
#11
If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!
#12
As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.
#13
Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
#14
No caparisons, miss, if you please. Caparisons don't become a young woman.
#15
You are not like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once, are you?
#16
The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it.
#17
My valor is certainly going!-it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out, as it were, at the palm of my hands!
#18
I own the soft impeachment.
#19
Through all the drama-whether damned or not- Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.
#20
I ne'er could any luster see In eyes that would not look on me.
#21
I loved him for himself alone.
#22
A bumper of good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar.
#23
Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.
#24
Tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers.
#25
You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.
#26
You had no taste when you married me.
#27
Here's to the maiden of bashful fifteen; Here's to the widow of fifty; Here's to the flaunting, extravegant quean, And here's to the housewife that's thrifty. Let the toast pass- Drink to the lass; I'll warrant she'll prove an excuse for the glass.
#28
An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance.
#29
Be just before you're generous.
#30
There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.
#31
The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous - licentious - abominable - infernal - Not that I ever read them-no-I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.
#32
Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
#33
A practitioner in panegyric, or, to speak more plainly, a professor of the art of puffing.
#34
The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.
#35
Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.
#36
I wish, sir, you would practice this without me. I can't stay dying here all night.
#37

Richard Brinsley Sheridan quotes