Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by King James I

Were I not a king, I would be a university man.

Smoking is hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.

I can make a lord, but only God can make a gentleman.

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

God has power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none: to raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soul and body due. And the like power have Kings; they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting down: of life, and of death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only.

Smoke.. makes a kitchen also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kinde of Soote as hath been found in some great Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened.

To make women learned and foxes tame has the same effect - to make them more cunning.

I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.

God gives not kings the stile of Gods in vaine, For on his throne his sceptre do they sway; And as their subjects ought them to obey, So kings should feare and serve their God againe.

The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.

Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library [the Bodleian].

If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agreeth as well with monarchy, as God and the devil. ... No bishop, no King! I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse.

It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: good Christians content themselves with His will revealed in His Word.

It is one of God's blessings that we cannot foreknow the hour of our death; for a time fixed, even beyond the possibility of living, would trouble us more than doth this uncertainty.

I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions...Let [the Papists] assure themselves, that, as I am a friend of their persons, if they be good subjects, so am I a vowed enemy, and do denounce mortal war to their errors.

That which concerns the mystery of the King's power is not lawful to be disputed; for that is to wade into the weakness of Princes, and to take away the mystical reverence that belongs unto them that sit in the throne of God.

On tobacco: A branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins.

That which we call wit consists much in quickness and tricks, and is so full of lightness that it seldom goes with judgment and solidity; but when they do meet, it is commonly in an honest man.

When a man makes up his mind to thrash another, he must also make up his mind to be a little thrashed himself.

Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God's good gifts, that the sweetness of man's breath, being a good gift of God, should be willfully corrupted by this stinking smoke.

The wisest fool in Christendom.