“Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit, Or what is worse, be left by it? Why dost thou load thyself when thou ‘rt to fly, Oh, man! ordain’d to die?”

Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, Thou who art under ground to lie? Thou sow’st and plantest, but no fruit must see, For death, alas! is reaping thee.

There Daphne’s Lover stopped, and thought it much The very leaves of her to touch: But Harvey, our Apollo, stopp’d not so; Into the Bark and Root he after her did go!

His time’s forever, everywhere his place.

I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a little feast.

Vain, weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise Up between two eternities!

Neither the praise nor the blame is our own.

Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

There have been fewer friends on earth than kings.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

The getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey.

“We may talk what we please,” he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, “of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles

It was not sleep that made him nod, he said, But too great weight and largeness of his head.

Plenty, as well as Want, can separate friends.

Let’s banish business, banish sorrow; To the gods belong to-morrow.

The liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.

To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man’s, into the world, as it is God’s.

Nature waits upon thee still, And thy verdant cup does fill; ‘Tis fill’d wherever thou dost tread, Nature’s self’s thy Ganymede.