William Wycherley
9 quotes
Biography
William Wycherley was an English playwright best known for writing the plays The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676).
"Good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational and manly pleasures."
"Necessity, the mother of invention."
"And with faint praises one another damn."
"He lost his memory forty years before he died by a fever, and would repeat the same thought sometimes in the compass of ten lines, and did not dream of its being inserted but just before. When you pointed it out to him he would say, "Gads-so, so it is! I thank you very much: pray blot it out." He had the same single thoughts (which were very good) come into his head again that he had used twenty years before. His memory did not carry above a sentence at a time."
"Wycherley used to read himself asleep o' nights either in Montaigne, Rochefoucault, Seneca, or Gracian; for these were his favourite authors. He would read one or other of them in the evening, and the next morning, perhaps, write a copy of verses on some subject similar to what he had been reading; and have all the thoughts of his author, only expressed in a different mode, and that without knowing that he was obliged to any one for a single thought in the whole poem. I have experienced this in him several times (for I visited him for a whole winter, almost every evening and morning), and look upon it as one of the strangest phenomena that I ever observed in the human mind."
"Wit is more necessary than beauty and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it."
"Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes, But only death the jealous eyes can close."
"Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes, But only death the jealous eyes can close."
"Go to your business, pleasure, whilst I go to my pleasure, business."