Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Those that vow the most are the least sincere.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A bumper of good liquor will end a contest quicker than justice, judge, or vicar.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Do thou snatch treasures from my lips, and I'll take kingdoms back from thine.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike- no bail, no demurrer.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Modesty is a quality in a lover more praised by the women than liked.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Be just before you are generous.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

You know it is not my interest to pay the principal, or my principal to pay the interest.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

You write with ease to show your breeding, but easy writing's curst hard reading.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan