“How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be.”

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

I count all that part of my life lost which I spent not in communion with God, or in doing good.

The purity of man is the absence of something, the purity of Jesus is the presence of something.

Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is “timing” it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.

What we call evil is the absence of Light, of love, in all cases.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Total absence of humor makes life a total drudgery.

In order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Happiness is not the absence of problems; it’s the ability to deal with them.