Great Throughts Treasury

"Things are sullen, and will be as they are, whatever we think them or wish them to be."

"A good conscience is the best looking-glass of heaven."

"He that is once born of God shall overcome the world, and the prince of this world too, by the power of God in him. Holiness is no solitary, neglected thing; it hath stronger confederacies, greater alliances, than sin and wickedness. It is in league with God and the universe; the whole creation smiles upon it; there is something of God in it, and therefore it must needs be a victorious and triumphant thing."

"If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us."

"Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor and power of the mind, displaying itself from within."

"Now all the knowledge and wisdom that is in creatures, whether angels or men, is nothing else but a participation of that one eternal, immutable and increased wisdom of God, or several signatures of that one archetypal seal, or like so many multiplied reflections of one and the same face, made in several glasses, whereof some are clearer, some obscurer, some standing nearer, some further off."

"Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it."

"Sanctified afflictions are like so many artificers working on a pious man's crown to make it more bright and massive."

"Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself."

"Some novelists make a contracted idea of God, consisting of nothing but will and power."

"Some who are far from atheists, may make themselves merry with that conceit of thousands of spirits dancing at once upon a needle's point."

"The golden beams of truth and the silken cords of love, twisted together, will draw men on with a sweet violence, whether they will or not."

"The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true."

"To make wisdom to be regulated by such a plumbean and flexible rule as that [the will] is, is quite to destroy the nature of it."

"We have all a propensity to grasp at forbidden fruit."

"We seem to be to seek what the chief and highest good superior to knowledge"

"What is God but the very being of all things that yet are not, and the subsistence of things that are?"

"Truth and love are two of the most powerful things in the world; and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood."

"Should a poor wretched and diseased creature, that is full of sores and ulcers, be covered all over with purple, or clothed with scarlet, he would take but little contentment in it, whilst his sores and wounds remain upon him; and he had much rather be arrayed in rags, so he might obtain but soundness and health within. The gospel is a true Bethesda, a pool of grace, where such poor, lame and infirm creatures as we are, upon the moving of God’s Spirit in it, may descend down, not only to wash our skin and outside, but also to be cured of our diseases within. And whatever the world thinks, there is a powerful Spirit, that moves upon these waters, the waters of the gospel, spreading its gentle, healing, quickening wings over our souls. The gospel is not like Abana and Pharphar, those common rivers of Damascus, that could only cleanse the outside; but is a true Jordan, in which such leprous Naamans as we all are, "may wash and be clean." "Blessed indeed are they, whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered: Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin;" but yet rather blessed are they, whose sins are like a morning cloud, and quite taken away from them. Blessed, thrice "blessed are they, that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied: blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

"And yet for all that we shall not wrong it in the least in our representation, but giveit all possible advantages of strength and plausibility, that so the Atheists may haveno cause to pretend (as they are wont to do, in such cases) that either we did notunderstand their mysteries, nor apprehend the full strength of their cause, or elsedid purposely smother and conceal it. Which indeed we have been so far from, thatwe must confess we were not unwilling that this business of theirs should look alittle like something, that might deserve a confutation. And whether the Atheistsought not to give us thanks for mending and improving their arguments, thancomplain that we have any way impaired them, we shall leave it to the censure of impartial judgements"

"It has been indeed of late confidently asserted by some, that never any of the ancient philosophers dreamed of any such thing as incorporeal substance; and therefore they would bear men in hand, that it was nothing but an upstart and new-fangled invention of some bigotal religionists."

"That he asserted the immortality of the soul, and consequently its immateriality, isevident from his doctrine of pre-existence and transmigration: and that he likewiseheld an incorporeal deity distinct from the world, is a thing not questioned by any.But if there were any need of proving it (because there are no monuments of hisextant), perhaps it might be done from hence, because he was the chief propagatorof that doctrine amongst the Greeks concerning three hypostases in the Deity"

"The atomical physiology supposes that body is nothing else but extended bulk; and resolves therefore, that nothing is to be attributed to it, but what is included in the nature and idea of it, viz. more or less magnitude, with divisibility into parts, figure and position, together with motion or rest, but so as that no part of body can ever move itself, but is always moved by something else. And consequently it supposes that there is no need of any thing else besides the simple elements of magnitude, figure, site and motion (which are all clearly intelligible as different modes of extended substance) to solve the corporeal phenomena by; and therefore, not of any substantial forms distinct from the matter..."

"He that is once "born of God shall overcome the world," and the prince of this world too, by the power of God in him. Holiness is no solitary, neglected thing; it hath stronger confederacies, greater alliances, than sin and wickedness. It is in league with God and the universe; the whole creation smiles upon it; there is something of God in it, and therefore it must needs be a victorious and triumphant thing."

"Anaximander?s opinion is, that the gods are native, rising and vanishing again in long periods of time."

"How conformable Socrates was to the Pagan religion and worship may appear from those last dying words of his, when he should be most serious."

"True zeal is an ignis lambeus, a soft and gentle flame, that will not scorch one's hand."

"Truth is the most unbending and uncompliable, the most necessary, firm, immutable, and adamantine thing in the world."