Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness
Peace is unattained by part performance of conditions, even as a chemical combination is impossible without complete fulfillment of the conditions of attainment thereof.
And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.
The world can be at peace only if the world is stable, and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquility of spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
Plain living and high thinking are no more. The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.