“For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so Then people long on pilgrimage to go And palmers to be seeking foreign strands To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.”

Take a cat, nourish it well with milk and tender meat, make it a couch of silk.

One flesh they are; and one flesh, so I’d guess, Has but one heart, come grief or happiness.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Love will not be constrain’d by mastery. When mast’ry comes, the god of love anon Beateth his wings, and, farewell, he is gone. Love is a thing as any spirit free.

If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could possibly marry.

By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting.

With empty hand no man can lure a hawk.

If love be good, from whence cometh my woe?

There’s no workman, whatsoever he be, That may both work well and hastily.

Every honest miller has a golden thumb.

Harde is his heart that loveth nought In May.

Abstinence is approved of God.

What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.

If gold rust, what then will iron do? For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust.

With empty hands men may no hauks lure.

When men are full of envy they disparage everything, whether it be good or bad.

To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.

Everything at a distance turns into poetry; distant mountains, distant people, distant events; all become Romantic.

learning must travel the distance from head to heart.

It’s good to have a little distance. If you discuss your love too much, it just damages it.

Your body’s made to run, to walk, to trek long distances and carry things, work in a forest, and hunt animals. You have to keep it alive to function.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.