“Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.”

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

I count all that part of my life lost which I spent not in communion with God, or in doing good.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.

I do not love a man, except I hate his vices, because those vices are the enemies, and the destruction of that friend whom I love.

For love all love of other sights controls and makes one little room an everywhere.