ABRAHAM COWLEY

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.

Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.

Life is an incurable disease.

The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature were inconstancy.

This only grant me, that my means may lie too low for envy, for contempt too high.

His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was always in the right.

Hope! of all ills that men endure, the only cheap and universal cure.

God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

Nothing is to come, and nothing past: But an eternal now, does always last.

To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's.

Why to mute fish should'st thou thyself discoverAnd not to me, thy no less silent lover?

Gold begets in brethren hate; Gold in families debate; Gold does friendship separate; Gold does civil wars create.

The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.

Hope! fortune's cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

The monster London laugh at me.

What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own?

There is some help for all the defects of fortune; for, if a man cannot attain to the length of his wishes, he may have his remedy by cutting of them shorter.

The world's a scene of changes.