Jeremy Taylor

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement.

Love is friendship set on fire.

Secrecy is the chastity of friendship.

Marriage is the mother of the world. It preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself.

He that does a base thing in zeal for his friend burns the golden thread that ties their hearts together.

A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.

When you lie down with a short prayer, commit yourself into the hands of your Creator; and when you have done so, trust Him with yourself, as you must do when you are dying.

Whatsoever we beg of God, let us also work for it.

Conscience in most men is but the anticipation of the opinions of others.

Every act of virtue is an ingredient unto reward.

On him that takes revenge, revenge shall be taken, and by a real evil he shall dearly pay for the goods that are but airy and fantastical; it is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

Curiosity is the direct incontinency of the spirit.

No man is poor who does not think himself so. But if in a full fortune with impatience he desires more, he proclaims his wants and his beggarly condition.

Conscience in most men, is but the anticipation of the opinions of others.

To be proud of learning is the greatest ignorance.

Habits are the daughters of action, but then they nurse their mother, and produce daughters after her image, but far more beautiful and prosperous.

The best theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge.

God hath given to man a short time here upon earth, and yet upon this short time eternity depends.

Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment: for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could.

If anger proceeds from a great cause, it turns to fury; if from a small cause, it is peevishness; and so is always either terrible or ridiculous.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.

Whoever is a hypocrite in his religion mocks God presenting to Him the outside and reserving the inward for his enemy.

The thing framed says that nothing framed it the tongue never made itself to speak and yet talks against him that did saying that which is made is and that which made it is not. But this folly is infinite as hell as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.

Dive on them and squash them if you must.

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.

He that speaketh against his own reason speaks against his own conscience, and therefore it is certain that no man serves God with a good conscience who serves him against his reason.

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.

Men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth.

A celibate like the fly in the heart of an apple dwells in a perpetual sweetness but sits alone and is confined and dies in singularity.

He that is proud of riches is a fool. For if he is exalted above his neighbors because he has more gold, how much inferior is he to a gold mine.

Know that you are your greatest enemy, but also your greatest friend.

Lust is a captivity of the reason and an enraging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul.