Quotes to inspire and reflect

True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice.

There shall be no love lost.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

As he brews, so shall he drink.

It must be done like lightning.

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt thou forgive that sin; through which I run, And do run still: though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For, I have more.

As sure as death.

Since I am coming to that holy room, Where, with thy choir of saints forevermore, I shall be made thy music; as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

Show me, dear Christ, Thy spouse, so bright and clear.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

What if this present were the world’s last night?

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, If lecherous goats, if serpents envious Cannot be damn’d; alas; why should I be?

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls.

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

Her pure, and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her body thought.

Nature’s great masterpiece, an Elephant, The only harmless great thing; the giant Of beasts.

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; For, thus friends absent speak.

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.

O my America! my new-found land.

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, To taste whole joys.

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

Who ever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he’s one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face.

The Alphabet Of flowers.

Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Take heed of loving me.

Ah cannot we As well as cocks and lions jocund be, After such pleasures?

Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For ’tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control, And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.

That subtle knot which makes us man: So must pure lovers’ souls descend T’ affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies.

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes, upon one double string; So to entergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.

Our two souls therefore which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks.

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 ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

The world’s whole sap is sunk: The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.

Send home my long strayed eyes to me, Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.

’Tis true, ’tis day; what though it be? O wilt thou therefore rise from me? Why should we rise, because ’tis light? Did we lie down, because ’twas night? Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither Should in despite of light keep us together.