Between cowardice and despair, valour is gendred.
Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it and made fit for God.
What gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God?
It is too little to call man a little world; Except God, man is a diminutive to nothing.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms, can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
But think that we Are but turned aside to sleep.
Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?
Great sins are great possessions; but levities and vanities possess us too; and men had rather part with Christ than with any possession.
Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.
In the first minute that my soul is infused, the Image of God is imprinted in my soul; so forward is God in my behalf, and so early does he visit me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Nature hath no goal though she hath law.
Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Our two souls therefore which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.
God affords no man the comfort, the false comfort of Atheism: He will not allow a pretending Atheist the power to flatter himself, so far, as to seriously think there is no God.
Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!
All our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.
Religion is not a melancholy, the spirit of God is not a damper.
The Psalms foretell what I, what any shall do and suffer and say.