John Webster Quotes

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.” —John Webster

I account this world a tedious theater, For I do play a part in 't 'gainst my will.

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

What a strange creature is a laughing fool, As if a man were created to no use But only to show his teeth.

Do you not weep? Other sins only speak, murder shreaks out: The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits; and 'tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges, You may open them both ways: any way, for heaven-sake

The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes with the sword of justice.

What do you think is my favourite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. "Wuthering Heights." Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth churchyard. She had never known any men in her life; how could she imagine a man like Heathcliff? I couldn't do it, and I'm quite young and never outside the John Grier Asylum - I've had every chance in the world. Sometimes a dreadful fear comes over me that I'm not a genius. Will you be awfully disappointed, Daddy, if I don't turn out to be a great author?

Heaven-gates are not so highly arched As princes' palaces; they that enter there Must go upon their knees.

There's nothing of so infinite vexation as man's own thoughts

There’s nothing of so infinite vexation As man’s own thoughts. John Webster, The White Devil

Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves.

What! because we are poor Shall we be vicious?

Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.

Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

The chiefest action for a man of great spirit is never to be out of action... the soul was never put into the body to stand still.

Condemn you me for that the duke did love me? So may you blame some fair and crystal river, For that some melancholic distracted man Hath drowned himself in’t.

Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together.

I am Duchess of Malfi still.

What's this flesh? A little cruded milk Fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those Paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, Since our is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever seen A lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world Is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads Like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge Of the small compass of our prison.

You have left me heartless; mine is in your bosom.

we had need to borrow that fantastic glass,invented by Galileo the Florentine To view another spacious world in the moon and look to find a constant woman there

Sometimes the Devil doth preach.

O that I were a man, or that I had power To execute my apprehended wishes! I would whip some with scorpions.

Are you out of your princely wits?" What's he? Let me have his beard sawed off and his eyebrows filed more civil!

Think't the best voyage that e'er you made like an irregular crab which, though’t goes backward, thinks that it goes right, because it goes its own way.

بخت به راستی یک روسپی است:اگر بخششی کند ذره ذره می دهد تا یکباره باز ستاند.

Princes give rewards with their own hands, But death or punishment by the hands of other.

We endure the strokes like anvils or hard steel, Till pain itself make us no pain to feel.

Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels, That she may take away all at one swoop.

As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils.

Integrity of life is fame's best friend, Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

Ha, ha, ha, thou entanglest thyself in thine own work like a silkworm.

Pull and pull strongly for your able strength / Must pull down heaven upon me

If all my royal kindred Lay in my way unto this marriage, I'ld make them my low foot-steps

God is not silent; God says, as Isaiah puts it, “Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live” (Isaiah 55:3). Faith

Lovers die inward that their flames conceal.

Religion is sin when it makes God into something which we can handle.

And as Daniel Webster put it, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

We are merely the star's tennis balls, struck and banded Which way please them.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust. —JOHN WEBSTER Grant

Duchess: Diamonds are of most value, They say, that have pass’d through most jewellers’ hands. Ferdinand: Whores, by that rule, are precious. —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (I.ii)

You know, Daddy, I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding. It ought to be cultivated in children. But the John Grier Home instantly stamped out the slightest flicker that appeared. Duty was the one quality that was encouraged. I don't think children ought to know the meaning of the word; it's odious, detestable. They ought to do everything from love.

Theology is not free speech but holy speech. It is set apart for and bound to its object - that is, the gospel - and to the fellowship of the saints in which the gospel is heard as divine judgement and consolation-that is, the Church.

Right! There are plots. Your beauty! Oh, ten thousand curses on 't! How long have I beheld the devil in crystal! Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice, With music, and with fatal yokes of flowers, To my eternal ruin. Woman to man Is either a god, or a wolf.

Perhaps the twentieth-century Senator is not called upon to risk his entire future on one basic issue in the manner of Edmund Ross or Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps our modern acts of political courage do not arouse the public in the manner that crushed the career of Sam Houston and John Quincy Adams. Still, when we realize that a newspaper that chooses to denounce a Senator today can reach many thousand times as many voters as could be reached by all of Daniel Webster’s famous and articulate detractors put together, these stories of twentieth-century political courage have a drama, an excitement—and an inspiration—all their own.

I was looking at the sensoriums of heroes. I was sensing through the eyes and nose of Shelley and John Webster, and using the hearing and touch of Ginsberg and Duncan and Kerouac–– and the jazz lucidity of Creeley, and the Doug fir of Snyder, and the almost mystical, physical perceptions of D.H. Lawrence and of Olson himself. I was convinced that poetry was about, by, and from, the meat, that poetry was the product of flesh brushing itself against experience. We are seekers moving in the Tathagata brushing ourselves against the universe of the real, solid illusions. It is by our touches that we become ourselves –– as our ancestors became us and as we became our maturing, sharpening, brightening selves.

For all our wit and reading brings us to a truer sense of sorrow.

for places in the court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower.

When I go to hell, I mean to carry a bribe: for look you, good gifts evermore make way for the worst persons.

To say that we are under grace is to say that the final truth of our lives, the final authority by which we are made and judged, is Jesus Christ the mercy of God. If

Life isn’t our possession, something we own. We’re alive as we receive life from God, as the gift of his grace and mercy.

Contentment is not mastering circumstances but faith in God.

What's a whore? She's like the guilty counterfeited coin Which whosoe're first stamps it brings in trouble all that receive it.

She and I were twins: And should I die this instant, I had liv'd her time to a minute.

Take it for words. O woman’s poor revenge, Which dwells but in the tongue!

Black-birds fatten best in hard weather

Let all that do ill, take this precedent: Man may his fate foresee, but not prevent. And of all axioms this shall win the prize, 'Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

L'humain, comme l'épice, ne se révèle que broyé

Search the heads of the greatest rivers in the world, you shall find them but bubbles of water.

Dear Judy: Your letter is here. I have read it twice, and with amazement. Do I understand that Jervis has given you, for a Christmas present, the making over of the John Grier Home into a model institution, and that you have chosen me to disburse the money? Me - I, Sallie McBride, the head of an orphan asylum! My poor people, have you lost your senses, or have you become addicted to the use of opium, and is the raving of two fevered imaginations? I am exactly as well fitted to take care of one hundred children as to become the curator of a zoo.

In the most literal sense they are impossible to reform because they have ceased to be human, having been transformed into abstract structures of superb efficiency, independent of lasting human control survival mechanisms. This is not a devil you can wrestle with as Daniel Webster did with Old Scratch, but one that has to be starved to death by depriving it of victims.

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. GENESIS 1:28 Abide in me. JOHN 15:4 Go . . . [to] all nations. MATTHEW 28:19 Stay . . . and go. Jesus is our staying power in all our going. If you’ll stay while you go, you may not always know where you’re going. But you can know that wherever you end up, He will walk you there. [1] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.

I heard Mr. Ingersoll many years ago in Chicago. The hall seated 5,000 people; every inch of standing-room was also occupied; aisles and platform crowded to overflowing. He held that vast audience for three hours so completely entranced that when he left the platform no one moved, until suddenly, with loud cheers and applause, they recalled him. He returned smiling and said: 'I'm glad you called me back, as I have something more to say. Can you stand another half-hour?' 'Yes: an hour, two hours, all night,' was shouted from various parts of the house; and he talked on until midnight, with unabated vigor, to the delight of his audience. This was the greatest triumph of oratory I had ever witnessed. It was the first time he delivered his matchless speech, 'The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child'. I have heard the greatest orators of this century in England and America; O'Connell in his palmiest days, on the Home Rule question; Gladstone and John Bright in the House of Commons; Spurgeon, James and Stopford Brooke, in their respective pulpits; our own Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Webster and Clay, on great occasions; the stirring eloquence of our anti-slavery orators, both in Congress and on the platform, but none of them ever equalled Robert Ingersoll in his highest flights. {Stanton's comments at the great Robert Ingersoll's funeral}

Our lives were absolutely monotonous and uneventful. Nothing nice ever happened, except ice-cream on Sundays, and even that was regular. In all the eighteen years I was there I only had one adventure — when the woodshed burned. We had to get up in the night and dress so as to be ready in case the house should catch. But it didn't catch and we went back to bed. Everybody likes a few surprises; it's a perfectly natural human craving. But I never had one until Mrs. Lippett called me to the office to tell me that Mr. John Smith was going to send me to college. And then she broke the news so gradually that it just barely shocked me.

Revelation is purposive. Its end is not simply divine self-display, but the overcoming of human opposition, alienation and pride, and their replacement by knowledge, love and fear of God. In short: revelation is reconciliation.

Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flow'rs do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse and the mole, To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm, But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, For with his nails he'll dig them up again. Let holy Church receive him duly, Since he paid the church-tithes truly.

FERDINAND: Look, what’s that follows me? MALATESTE: Nothing, my lord. FERDINAND: Yes. MALATESTE: ‘Tis your shadow. FERDINAND: Stay it; let it not haunt me. MALATESTE: Impossible, if you move, and the sun shine. FERDINAND: I will throttle it. [Throws himself upon his shadow.]

One of the great leaders of America was Daniel Webster. That great bulging brow of his and those blazing eyes used to hold the Senate spellbound as he stood there and talked to them not with silly quips or funny remarks. The Senate in those days was not composed of half-baked comedians but of strong, noble statesmen who carried the weight of the nation on their shoulders. Someone said, “Mr. Webster, what do you consider the most serious thought that has ever entered your mind?” He said, “The most solemn thought that has ever entered my mind is the accountability to my Maker.

One thing we might do is to try day by day to grasp something which is the simplest and yet the hardest thing for any of us to grasp: that the gospel is true; that growth in the Christian life is simply growth in seeing that the gospel is true; that Jesus Christ is the preeminent reality of all things.

Go on and finish your studies,” Gore said. “You are poor enough, but there are greater evils than poverty. Live on no man’s favor. What bread you do eat, let it be the bread of independence. Pursue your profession. Make yourself useful to your friends and a little formidable to your enemies, and you have nothing to fear.

Paul’s contentment derives from God. It’s not a matter of human strength of character; it’s a matter of human weakness transfigured by the astonishing sufficiency of God. Contentment is that exercise of faith in which we accept the sufficiency of God. It’s not feeling all right; it’s not mastery of circumstance. It’s the fruit of the conversion of our lives to the grace and goodness of God.

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases, were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow (subliminally this may have participated in the making of lines 5-12). I imagine, that during the period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.

So I can only conclude that American democracy inherently does not want good leadership. We always passed over the very great men we had like Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, John Fremont, and the people after the Civil War like Carl Shurz. We pass them up because we don’t want first-class men in that position, we want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We’re afraid of good leadership until a time of crisis,

God GOD, noun [Saxon god; German gott; Dutch god; Swedish and Danish gud; Gothic goth or guth; Pers. goda or choda; Hindoo, khoda, codam. As this word and good are written exactly alike in Saxon, it has been inferred that God was named from his goodness. But the corresponding words in most of the other languages, are not the same, and I believe no instance can be found of a name given to the Supreme Being from the attribute of goodness. It is probably an idea too remote from the rude conceptions of men in early ages. Except the word Jehovah, I have found the name of the Supreme Being to be usually taken from his supremacy or power, and to be equivalent to lord or ruler, from some root signifying to press or exert force. Now in the present case, we have evidence that this is the sense of this word, for in Persic goda is rendered dominus, possessor, princeps, as is a derivative of the same word. See Cast. Lex. Col. 231.] 1. The Supreme Being; Jehovah; the eternal and infinite spirit, the creator, and the sovereign of the universe. God is a spirit; and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4. 2. A false god; a heathen deity; an idol. Fear not the gods of the Amorites. Judges 6. 3. A prince; a ruler; a magistrate or judge; an angel. Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people. Exodus 22. Psalm 97. [Gods here is a bad translation.] 4. Any person or thing exalted too much in estimation, or deified and honored as the chief good. Whose god is their belly. Philippians 3.

In perhaps the strangest statement published on the issue of arming slaves, the Mercury charged Robert E. Lee (who had not yet made his views public but was privately known to be a supporter) with being a Federalist-like Alexander Hamilton-someone who had always evidenced a "profound disbelief in the institution of slavery." This comparison was drawn in contrast to South Carolina's great Democratic/states' rights standard-bearer John C. Calhoun, and the paper put the question starkly as "JOHN C. CALHOUN VS. DANIEL WEBSTER and ROBERT E. LEE.

There’s no resolution to the conflicts of our lives within ourselves, no freedom from wickedness to be sought in striving, no peace with God which is the fruit of moral effort. And the reason why there is none is that we are, indeed, defeated by sin. It’s not that we’re occasionally overcome, or even that more often than not we lose the battle with ourselves. It’s that we’re wholly defeated, ruined, “there is no health in us.” To look to ourselves, therefore, to try to sort ourselves out by doing an audit of our moral lives or a clean-up operation on our spirituality is, quite literally, a hopeless undertaking.

What Homer could never have foreseen is the double idiocy into which we now educate our children. We have what look like our equivalent to the Greek “assemblies”; we can watch them on cable television, as long as one can endure them. For they are charades of political action. They concern themselves constantly, insufferably, about every tiniest feature of human existence, but without slow deliberation, without balance, without any commitment to the difficult virtues. We do not have men locked in intellectual battle with other men, worthy opponents both, as Thomas Paine battled with John Dickinson, or Daniel Webster with Robert Hayne. We have men strutting and mugging for women nagging and bickering. We have the sputters of what used to be language, “tweets,” expressions of something less than opinion. It is the urge to join—something, anything—while remaining aloof from the people who live next door, whose names we do not know. Aristotle once wrote that youths should not study politics, because they had not the wealth of human experience to allow for it; all would become for them abstract and theoretical, like mathematics, which the philosopher said was more suitable for them. He concluded that men should begin to study politics at around the age of forty. Whether that wisdom would help us now, I don’t know.

The eventual religious affiliation of Indian tribes depended not only on the success of missionaries in making first contact but on the compatibility of their social patterns with the types of Christianity from which they were able to choose. The Oblates were delighted with the response of the tractable Déné of the far northwest. Anglicans had greater success with the Tudukh, whom they found 'more lively and affectionate' although 'more superstitious' than the Déné. In British Columbia the Roman Catholics were able to plant missions among the interior Salish, who liked their ceremonies and readily accepted their disciplined approach to community life. From the warlike Kwakiutls, Haidas and Tsimshians of the coast they met only rebuffs, but it was among these tribes that the more emotional Methodists were able to establish themselves.

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.

UWhether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.

Sai, Papà, credo che la qualità più importante in una persona sia l'immaginazione. Rende la gente capace di mettersi nei panni degli altri. Li rende più gentili, comprensivi e sensibili. Ѐ una virtù che andrebbe coltivata nei bambini, invece al John Grier ne soffocavano subito sul nascere anche la più piccola scintilla. Il dovere! Il dovere era la sola qualità che incoraggiavano laggiù. Sono convinta che i bambini non dovrebbero nemmeno conoscere il significato di questa odiosa parola. Dovrebbero fare tutto solo per amore.

There are rewards for hawks and dogs when they have done us service; but for a soldier that hazards his limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of geometry is his last supportation.

Nature doth nothing so great for great men, as when she's pleased to make them lords of truth: Integrity of life is fame's best friend, which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

The story of the passion, these few brief hours one afternoon in the history of the world, [is] the outworking of the eternal will of God for our salvation. Jesus’ abandonment and death is not his defeat. It does not spell the overthrow of God’s ways—quite the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of those ways, the fulfillment of the eternal resolve of God to be our God, to take up our cause, to put an end to our opposition and establish our peace. ‘By oppression and judgment he was taken away,’ Isaiah tells us. ‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; …he has put him to grief’ (53:8a, 10). This is God’s doing. This is not tragedy; it’s not Jesus overtaken by a destiny which he could not master. It’s the fulfillment in time of the eternal purpose of God.

We make desire, not truth, the real clue to what’s valuable. If we desire something, then it has value; if not, we despise and reject.

Believing can mean something a good deal less than certainty. I believe the bus will come in five minutes, but I can’t be sure. Or sometimes it can mean the kind of knowledge which is acquired after scrupulous review of evidence to build up a cumulative case for some conviction. But believing [as Scripture presents it] is not half-certainty, nor the fruit of mental effort. It’s belief in the deep, strong sense of giving allegiance to something which overwhelms us. To believe in the Lord Jesus…is to do far more than simply give him a passing nod with the mind or even to honor him with our religious devotion. It’s the astonished business of being so overthrown by his reality, so mastered by his sheer presence, so judged by him, that we can do nothing other than acknowledge that he is supremely real, supremely true. To believe in him is to confess him—to affirm with mind and will and heart that he fills all things, that our only hope lies in his name. ¶ Belief in this sense concerns the entire shape of a personal life. It embraces the whole of us. It’s not one department of our life, something in which we engage alongside all the other things we do—working, loving, hoping, creating, worrying, and so on. Believing is about the way in which we dispose the world of our existence. We believe when we’re totally shaped by something outside of us, acknowledging that it has put a decisive stamp on all that we are and all that we do. This is why belief in this deep, strong sense defines us completely: We’re “believers,” doing all that we do out of the inescapable conviction that the Lord Jesus is the persistent factor in the whole of our life. Believing in him, confessing him, involves no less than everything.

Sin is misery, because it’s the perversion of our natures away from God. Sin deforms human life, which always leads to suffering. We cannot hope to despise God and his ways and remain authentically human—yet the singular history of the human race is that we do just that: break loose from God, tear up our roots in his life-giving presence, and then wonder why it hurts. Sin ruins us; and in ruining us it makes us guilty. It makes us feel guilty because we are guilty, our lives characterized by iniquity and lawlessness.

Betrayal means that, faced with opposition or temptation or ridicule, we fail to stand by a commitment to another. It’s another instance of that vicious lack of integrity which affects human life and fellowship—we make promises but break them; our word is not our bond; our fidelity is worthless.

Fellowship with God is what human beings are for. That is, we flourish as human beings if we live in free and joyful and humble relation to God. To be human is to be in relation to God—and that relation to God is not a sort of added extra, something to supplement our lives. It is the core of being human; it is the way in which we are properly alive. We are alive and truly human as we live in and from that fellowship.

Our believing has no power of itself; we certainly aren’t saved by belief. We’re saved by the grace and goodness and majesty of him in whom we believe—by the one whom we confess as we believe. In a real sense, our belief is nothing in and of itself. It’s simply a looking to him, a listening to him, in which we are wholly absorbed by that which we see and hear.

…The heart of the matter, the heart of the Christian message, is constituted by a fearful question and a merciful answer: What must I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved.

…We know in advance what’s going to be said, and so we forget to listen….

Why is it that we often go away from Scripture unmoved, unaffected, dull? In the end, it’s because we refuse to be schooled by Christ.

In company with Christians down through the ages, we read…every passage of Scripture…out of the fact that for us, the center of Scripture is Jesus Christ.

When we hear prophecy, we may not and must not treat it with cool detachment; prophecy isn’t a matter for our appraisal but for our attention.