Quotes from Jeremy Taylor

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

To be perpetually longing and impatiently desirous of anything, so that a man cannot abstain from it, is to lose a man's liberty, and to become a servant of meat and drink, or smoke.

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

To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him.

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.

Aquinas was once asked, with what compendium a man might become learned? He answered "By reading of one book.

It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. Experience and humility teach modesty and fear.

Man and wife are equally concerned, to avoid all offence of each other, in the beginning of their conversation. Every little thing can blast an infant blossom.

In matters of conscience that is the best sense which every wise man takes in before he hath sullied his understanding with the designs of sophisters and interested persons.

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

Ye shall fear every man his mother and his father.

All virtuous women, like tortoises, carry their house on their heads, and their chappel in their heart, and their danger in their eye, and their souls in their hands, and God in all their actions.

Mercy is like the rainbow, which God hath set in the clouds; it never shines after it is night. If we refuse mercy here, we shall have justice in eternity.

since God has appointed one remedy for all the evils in the world and that is a contented spirit.

Enjoy the blessings of this day, if God sends them; and the evils of it bear patiently and sweetly: for this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.

Nothing is greater or more fearful sacrilege than to prostitute the great name of God to the petulancy of an idle tongue.

Certain it is, that as nothing can better do it; so there is nothing greater, for which God made our tongues, next to reciting His praises, than to minister comfort to a weary soul.

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

A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.

God fails not to sow blessings in the furrows.

When thou receivest praise, take it indifferently, and return it to God, the giver of the gift, or blesser of the action.

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.

The body of our prayer is the sum of our duty; and as we must ask of God whatsoever we need, so we must watch and labor for all that we ask.

Faith gives new light to the soul, but it does not put our eyes out; and what God hathgivenusinournature could never be intended as a snare to Religion, or engage us to believe a lie.