More hearts pine away in secret anguish for unkindness from those who should be their comforters, than for any other calamity in life.
—Edward Young
Heaven gives us friends, to bless the present scene; resumes them to prepare us for the next.
—Edward Young
Topics: Friendship
It is great and manly to disdain disguise; it shows our spirit, and prove our strength.
—Edward Young
Topics: Candor
Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time’s enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root.
—Edward Young
Topics: Time
No man ever served God by doing things tomorrow. If we honor Christ, and are blessed, it is by the things which we do today.
—Edward Young
Topics: Delay
A man of pleasure is a man of pains.
—Edward Young
Topics: Pain, Pleasure
Voracious learning, often over-fed, digests not into sense her motley meal. This bookcase, with dark booty almost burst, this forager on others’ wisdom, leaves her native farm, her reason, quite untill’d.
—Edward Young
Topics: Learning
Virtue alone outbuilds the pyramids; her monument shall last when Egypts fall.
—Edward Young
It is falling in love with our own mistaken ideas that makes fools and beggars of half mankind.
—Edward Young
Topics: Self-love
Oh! lost to virtue, lost to manly thought, lost to the noble sallies of the soul, who think it solitude to be alone.
—Edward Young
Topics: Solitude
They that on glorious ancestors enlarge, produce their debt, instead of their discharge.
—Edward Young
Topics: Ancestry
Reason is progressive; instinct is complete; swift instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.
—Edward Young
Topics: Reason
Of plain, sound sense, life’s current coin is made.
—Edward Young
All evils natural, are moral goods; all discipline, indulgence on the whole.
—Edward Young
Topics: Evils
Gravity—the body’s wisdom to conceal the mind.
—Edward Young
Topics: Media
Too low they build who build beneath the stars.
—Edward Young
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
Matter immortal? and shall spirit die?—
Above the nobler, shall less nobler rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
no resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man! Be sown in barren ground,
Less privileg’d than grain, on which he feeds?
—Edward Young
Topics: Immortality
He who increases the endearments of life, increases at the same time the terrors of death.
—Edward Young
Topics: Life
A God all mercy is a God unjust.
—Edward Young
Topics: Religion, Mercy
Nature is the glass reflecting God, as by the sea reflected is the sun, too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere.
—Edward Young
Topics: Nature
The first sure symptom of a mind in health, is rest of heart, and pleasure felt at home.
—Edward Young
Topics: Home
Cast an eye on the gay and fashionable world, and what see we for the most part, but a set of querulous, emaciated, fluttering fantastical beings, worn out in the keen pursuit of pleasure—creatures that know, own, condemn, deplore, and yet pursue their own infelicity? The decayed monuments of error! The thin remains of what is called delight!
—Edward Young
Topics: Fashion
Most of our comforts grow up between our crosses.
—Edward Young
When tir’d with vain rotations of the day, sleep winds us up for the succeeding dawn.
—Edward Young
Topics: Sleep
Wonder is involuntary praise.
—Edward Young
Topics: Wonder
Too low they build who build below the skies.
—Edward Young
Topics: Ambition
I’ve lost a day—the prince who nobly cried, had been an emperor without his crown.
—Edward Young
Topics: Day
Poor is the friendless master of a world; a world in purchase of a friend is gain.
—Edward Young
Topics: Friendship
Let no man trust the first false step of guilt: it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in lost perdition ends.
—Edward Young
Topics: Guilt
Read nature; nature is a friend to truth; nature is Christian, preaches to mankind, and bids dead matter aid us in our creed.
—Edward Young
Topics: Nature