Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonsonwas an English playwright, poet, actor and literary critic of the 17th century, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, or The Foxe, The Alchemistand Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedyand for his lyric poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth11 June 1572
Let them call it mischief; when it is past and prospered, it will be virtue.
Affliction teacheth a wicked person sometime to pray; prosperity never.
Spread yourself upon his bosom publicly, whose heart you would eat in private.
A good man should and must Sit rather down with loss than rise unjust.
Greatness of name, in the father, ofttimes helps not forth, but overwhelms the son: They stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth.
All the wise world is little else, in nature, But parasites or subparasites.
I perceive affection makes a fool Of any man too much the father.
Passions are spiritual rebels and raise sedition against the understanding.
Popular men, They must create strange monsters, and then quell them, To make their arts seem something.
How ready is heaven to those that pray!
Men that talk of their own benefits are not believed to talk of them because they have done them, but to have done them because they might talk of them.
Fortune, thou hadst no deity, if men Had wisdom.
The voice so sweet, the words so fair, As some soft chime had stroked the air; And though the sound had parted thence, Still left an echo in the sense.
It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.