Philip Sidney > Quotes

“Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.”
― Philip Sidney

“Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: "Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.”
― Philip Sidney

“...music, I say, the most divine striker of the senses...”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“A brave captain is as a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring”
― Philip Sidney

“Either i will find a way, or i will make one.”
― Philip Sidney

“If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”
― Philip Sidney, Sir Philip Sydney's Defence of Poetry; And, Observations on Poetry and Eloquence, from the Discoveries of Ben Jonson

“With a sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend thy prince and country.”
― Philip Sidney

“...the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”
― Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry

“...think I none so simple would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts: for who thinks that Aesop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.”
― Philip Sidney

“For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.”
― Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings

“Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness.”
― Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings

“...scoffing cometh not of wisdom...”
― Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings

“I now have learned love right, and learned even so,
As who by being poisoned doth poison know.”
― Philip Sidney