“I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”

Our swords shall play the orators for us.

Love is not full of pity (as men say) But deaf and cruel, where he means to pray.

Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness.

Time doth run with calm and silent foot, Shortening my days and thread of vital life.

Lone women, like to empty houses, perish.

I’m armed with more than complete steel, – The justice of my quarrel.

Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast. What shall I do to shun the snares of death?

Virginity, albeit some highly prize it, Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth.

It lies not in our power to love or hate, for will in us is overruled by fate.

If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us. Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die. Ay, we must die an everlasting death.

What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

Make me immortal with a kiss.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learned man. Faustus is gone.

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

I am Envy, I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

Books, the children of the brain.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn’t have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.

Mozart didn’t need a scheme for his music. He played and sang with the heavenly lightness of a child.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

All one can really leave one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.