Jeremy Collier Quotes

Jeremy Collier critiques with sharp wit, delivering insights on civility, style and rhetoric that sharpen our sense of language.

13 quotes

1. This is brave Bear-Garden language!

2. The abuse of a thing is no argument against the use of it.

3. True courage is the result of reasoning. A brave mind is always impregnable.

4. Despair makes a despicable figure, and descends from a mean original. 'Tis the offspring of fear, of laziness and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and oftentimes of honesty, too. I would not despair unless I saw misfortune recorded in the book of fate, and signed and sealed by necessity.

5. To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.

6. Learning gives us a fuller conviction of the imperfections of our nature; which one would think, might dispose us to modesty.

7. A man that loves to be peevish and paramount, and to play the sovereign at every turn, does but blast the blessings of life, and swagger away his own enjoyments; and not to enlarge upon not folly, not to mention the injustice of such a behavior, it is always the sign of a little, unbenevolent temper. It is disease and discredit all over, and there is no more greatness in it, than in the swelling of a dropsy.

8. In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

9. 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.

10. Everyone has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.

11. Envy, like a cold prison, benumbs and stupefies; and, conscious of its own impotence, folds its arms in despair.

12. We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

13. Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according to the predominancy of the element.