All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated....As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!
For I am every dead thing In whom love wrought new alchemy For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.
And when a whirl-winde hath blowne the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebian bran.
This Extasie doth unperplex (We said) and tell us what we love, Wee see by this, it was not sexe, Wee see, we saw not what did move: But as all severall soules contain Mixture of things, they know not what, Love, these mixt souls, doth mixe againe. Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, But yet the body is his booke.
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.
True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore ; this is the second of our reign.
Poor heretics there be,Which think to establish dangerous constancy,But I have told them, ‘Since you will be true,You shall be true to them, who are false to you.