C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Sir Thomas Overbury

And all the carnal beauty of my wife

Is but skin-deep.

Books are a part of man’s prerogative

In formal ink, they thought and voices hold,

That we to them our solitude may give,

And make time present travel that of old,

Our life fame pieceth longer at the end,

And books it farther backward doth extend.

Give me, next good, an understanding wife,

By nature wise, not learned by much art;

Some knowledge on her side will all my life

More scope of conversation then impart;

Besides her inborn virtue fortify;

They are most good who best know why.

In part to blame is she,

Which hath without consent bin only tride;

He comes too neere, that comes to be denide.

Nay, but weigh well what you presume to swear,

Oaths are of dreadful weight! and, if they are false,

Draw down damnation.

A flatterer is the shadow of a fool.

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like a potato,—the only good belonging to him is underground.

Wit is brushwood, judgment timber; the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the durablest heat; and both meeting make the best fire.