Edward Hyde Clarendon Quotes

English historian and statesman
(1609 - 1674)

Anger is the most impotent of passions. - It affects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed. [Anger]

Because discretion is always predominant in true friendship, it works and prevails least upon fools. Wicked men are often reformed by it, weak men seldom. [Friendship]

Counsel and conversation are a second education, which improve all the virtue, and correct all the vice of the first, and of nature itself.

Few men have done more harm than those who have been thought to be able to do the least; and there cannot be a greater error than to believe a man whom we see qualified with too mean parts to do good, to be, therefore, incapable of doing hurt. There is a supply of malice, of pride, of industry, and even of folly, in the weakest, when he sets his heart upon it, that makes a strange progress in wickedness.
[Weakness]

Friendship hath the skill and observation of the best physician, the diligence and vigilance of the best nurse, and the tenderness and patience of the best mother. [Friendship]

God hath not taken all that pains in forming, framing, furnishing, and adorning this world, that they who were made by him to live in it, should despise it; it will be well enough if they do not love it so immoderately as to prefer it before him who made it. [World]

He that loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age, will hardly love them enough afterward to understand them. [Books]

If envy, like anger, did not burn itself in its own fire, and consume and destroy those persons it possesses before it can destroy those it wishes worst to, it would set the whole world on fire, and leave the most excellent persons the most miserable. [Envy]

If he had sat still, the enemy's army would have mouldered to nothing.

If our credit be so well built, so firm that it is not easy to be shaken by calumny or insinuation, envy then commends us, and extols us beyond reason to those upon whom we depend, till they grow jealous, and so blow us up when they cannot throw us down. [Envy]

If we did not take great pains to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us. [Nature]

If we do not weigh and consider to what end life is given us, and thereupon order and dispose it aright, pretend what we will as to arithmetic, we do not, and cannot number our days in the narrowest and most limited signification. [Life]

It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast.

No man is so insignificant as to be sure his example can do no hurt. [Example]

Pride, as it is compounded of the vanity and ill nature that dispose men to admire themselves, and contemn other men, retains its vigor longer than any other vice, and rarely expires but with life itself. Without the sovereign influence of God's grace, men very rarely put off all the trappings of their pride till they who are about them put on their winding-sheet. [Pride]

The disesteem and contempt of others is inseparable from pride. It is hardly possible to overvalue ourselves but by undervaluing our neighbors. [Pride]

The laboring man and the artificer knows what every hour of his time is worth, and parts not with it but for the full value: they are only noblemen and gentlemen, who should know best how to use it, that think it only fit to be cast away; and their not knowing how to set a true value upon this, is the true cause of the wrong estimate they make of all other things. [Time]

The law is the standard and guardian of our liberty; it circumscribes and defends it; but to imagine liberty without a law, is to imagine every man with his sword in his hand to destroy him, who is weaker than himself; and that would be no pleasant prospect to those who cry out most for liberty. [Law]

The seat of pride is in the heart, and only there; and if it be not there, it is neither in the look, nor in the clothes. [Pride]

They who are most weary of life, and yet are most unwilling to die, are such who have lived to no purpose; who have rather breathed than lived. [Life]