“People can die of mere imagination.”

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.

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.

The fields have eyes, and the woods have ears.

Men love newfangleness.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

He who accepts his poverty unhurt I’d say is rich although he lacked a shirt. But truly poor are they who whine and fret and covet what they cannot hope to get.

We have been dying since we got here and forgot to enjoy the view – live fully.

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.

The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.