Quotes by George Byron

• I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.
• Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
• I slept and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty.
• Lovers may be and indeed generally are enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.
• It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts, you have no idea of the pain it gives one.
• It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe; you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.
• If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
• Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure.
• I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
• Opinions are made to be changed or how is truth to be got at?
• For what were all these country patriots born? To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn?
• Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life, and if Virtue is not its own reward, I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.
• Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.
• But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
• All farewells should be sudden, when forever.
• A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover but will sooner or later find a tyrant.
• I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff- box from an emperor.
• The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
• Yes! ready money is Aladdin's lamp.
• Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.
• What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
• There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
• Nothing can confound a wise man more than laughter from a dunce.
• There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?
• The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.
• The best prophet of the future is the past.
• Sincerity may be humble but she cannot be servile.
• Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.
• Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
• Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.
• Romances I ne'er read like those I have seen.