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.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Prayer
A pure mind in a chaste body is the mother of wisdom and deliberation; sober counsels and ingenuous actions; open deportment and sweet carriage; sincere principles and unprejudiced understanding; love of God and self-denial; peace and confidence; holy prayers and spiritual comfort; and a pleasure of spirit infinitely greater than the sottish pleasure of unchastity.
—Jeremy Taylor
No sin is small.—It is against an infinite God, and may have consequences immeasurable.—No grain of sand is small in the mechanism of a watch.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Sin
Many are not able to suffer and endure prosperity; it is like the light of the sun to a weak eye, glorious, indeed, in itself, but not proportioned to such an instrument.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Prosperity
In self-examination, take no account of yourself by your thoughts and resolutions in the days of religion and solemnity, but examine how it is with you in the days of ordinary conversation and in the circumstances of secular employment.
—Jeremy Taylor
Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. For so have I heard, that all the noises and prating of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, are hushed and appeased upon the bringing upon them the light of a candle or torch. Every beam of reason and ray of knowledge checks the dissolution of the tongue.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Talking
Secrecy is the chastity of friendship.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Secrets, Secrecy
Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner of his joy; a friend shares my sorrow and makes it but a moiety, but he swells my joy and makes it double.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Sympathy
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster? To see rare effects, and no cause; a motion, without a mover; a circle, without a centre; a time, without an eternity; a second, without a first: these are things so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must be a beast in understanding who can believe in them. The thing formed, says that nothing formed it; and that which is made, is, while that which made it is not! This folly is infinite.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Atheism, Creation, Chance
When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayer should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a method of good and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty. By what we require of God we see what he requires of us.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Prayer
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.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: 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.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Habits, Habit
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.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Fortune
He that tempts me to drink beyond my measure, civilly invites me to a fever.
—Jeremy Taylor
To be proud of learning is the greatest ignorance.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Pride, Ignorance, Learning
Hasty conclusions are the mark of a fool; a wise man doubteth; a fool rageth and is confident; the novice saith, “I am sure that it is so” the better learned answers, “Peradventure, it may be so; but, I pray thee, inquire.” It is a little learning, and but a little, which makes men conclude hastily. Experience and humility teach modesty and fear.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Learning, Modesty
Nothing is a greater, or more fearful sacrilege than to prostitute the great name of God to the petulancy of an idle tongue.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Swearing, Vulgarity, Profanity
It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon man as men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Misfortune
Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interest of mankind, and is that state of good to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Marriage, Sex
In the use of the tongue God hath distinguished us from beasts, and by the well cr ill using it we are distinguished from one another; and therefore, though silence be innocent at death, yet it is rather the state of death than life.
—Jeremy Taylor
Men are apt to prefer a prosperous error to an afflicted truth.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Mistakes
Adultery itself in its principle is many times nothing but a curious inquisition after, and envy of another man’s enclosed pleasures: and there have been many who refused fairer objects that they might ravish an enclosed woman from her retirement and single possessor.
—Jeremy Taylor
A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament.
—Jeremy Taylor
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; for no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labor is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the Devil.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Labor
Two things create love perfection and usefulness, to which answer, on our part, admiration and desire; and both these are centered in love.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Love
Let your sleep be necessary and healthful, not idle and expensive of time beyond the needs and conveniences of nature; and sometimes be curious to see the preparation the sun makes when he is coming forth from his chambers in the east.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Morning
No man can hinder our private addresses to God; every man can build a chapel in his breast, himself the priest, his heart the sacrifice, and the earth he treads on, the altar.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Prayer
He that is proud of riches is a fool. For if he be exalted above his neighbors because he hath more gold, how much inferior is he to a gold mine.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Riches, Wealth
He that hath so many and great causes of joy, and yet is in love with sorrow and peevishness, deserves to starve in the midst of plenty, and to want comfort, while he is encircled with blessings.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Sorrow
It is not the eye that sees the beauty of the heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetness of music or the glad tidings of a prosperous occurrence, but the soul, that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions.
—Jeremy Taylor
Topics: Understanding