James Howell

James Howell (c. 1594 – c. 1666) was a Welsh author, diplomat and scholar.

• Some hold translations not unlike to be
  The wrong side of a Turkey tapestry.
  • Bk. 1, no. 6

• Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are secretaries of Nature.
  • Bk. 2, no. 2

• One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.
  • Bk. 2, no. 4

    Cf. Pope, The Rape of the Lock, canto 2, l. 27

• He that hath once got the fame of an early riser, may sleep till noon.
  • Bk. 2, no. 14

• Burn not thy fingers to snuff another man's candle.

• He that hath eaten a bear-pie, will always smell of the garden.

• A hungry man is an angry man.

• To have gold brings fear; to have none brings grief.

• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

  Cf. The Shining (1980 film)

• Owe money at Easter and Lent will seem short to thee.

• Words and works eat not at one table.

• The Devil turns his back to a door that is shut.

• Happy is he that grows wise by other men's harms.

• God consents but not always.

• Neither go to a wedding nor a christening unbid.

• Affection is blind reason.

• To whom thy secret thou dost tell, to him thy freedom thou dost sell.

• There's fence against all things except death.

• He falls in the pit he digs for others.

• Sometimes an ill favored bitch gnaws a good chord.

• The wealth of a churchman God gives it, and the Devil takes it away.

• Appetite is better than surfeit.

• He will bless God, and love England ever after
  • (Upon a travelling man's return from overseas to England)

• The Netherlands have been for many years, as one may say, the very cockpit of Christendom.

• Words are the soul's embassadors, who go
  Abroad upon her errands to and fro;
  They are the sole expounders of the mind,
  And correspondence keep 'twist all mankind.
  They are those airy keys that ope (and wrest
  Sometimes) the locks and hinges of the breast.
  By them the heart makes sallies: wit and sense
  Belong to them: they are the quintescence
  Of those ideas which the thoughts distil,
  And so calcine and melt again, until
  They drop forth into accents; in whom lies
  The salt of fancy, and all faculties.
  • Reported in John F. Addington (ed.) Poetical Quotations (Philadelphia: John Grigg, 1829) p. 280

• 'Tis only man can words create,
  And cut the air to sounds articulate
  By nature's special charter. Nay, speech can
  Make a shrewd discrepance 'twist man and man:
  It doth the gentleman from clown discover;
  And from a fool the grave philosopher;
  As Solon said to one in judgment weak,
  I thought thee wise until I heard thee speak.
  • Reported in Poetical Quotations (1829) p. 280

• Words are the life of knowledge; they set free,
  And bring forth truth by way of midwif'ry:
  The activ'st creatures of the teeming brain,
  The judges who the inward man arraign:
  Reason's chief engine and artillery
  To batter error, and make falsehood fly;
  The cannons of the mind, who sometimes bounce
  Nothing but war, then peace again pronounce.
  • Reported in Poetical Quotations (1829) p. 280

• Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape,
  And of rude commons rich enclosures make.
  • Reported in Sarah Josepha Hale (ed.) The Poet's Offering: for 1850 (Philadelphia: Grigg, Elliot & Co., 1850) p. 32

• Essays and letters by James Howell at Quotidiana.org