“Nor can they understand why a totally useless substance like gold should now, all over the world, be considered far more important than human beings, who gave it such value as it has, purely for their own convenience.”

For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.

The increasing influence of the Bible is marvelously great, penetrating everywhere. It carries with it a tremendous power of freedom and justice guided by a combined force of wisdom and goodness.

And peradventure we have more cause to thank Him for our loss than for our winning; for His wisdom better seeth what is good for us than we do ourselves.

Two evils, greed and faction are the destruction of all justice.

The things we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labor for.

As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language.

The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.

Getting married is like putting one’s hand in a bag containing 99 serpents and one eel.

No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want – or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you’re better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.

Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.

To gold and silver nature hath given no use that we may not well lack.

Take something from yourself, to give to another, that is humane and gentle and never takes away as much comfort as it brings again.

It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.

It is possible to live for the next life and still be merry in this.

It is part of the business of life to be affable and pleasing to those whom either nature, chance or circumstance has made our companions.

A pretty face may be enough to catch a man, but it takes character and good nature to hold him.

Every man has by the law of nature a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

You are not the feelings or the thoughts or the contents of your awareness. None of these are who you are. You are the fullness of your Being, the substance of your presence.

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

It’s the glitches and twists, I thought, that make this universe unique and compelling. Without flaws, there would be no depth, no substance.

Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.