Thomas Vaughan Quotes

Ignorance gave this release the name of death, but properly it is the soul's birth and a charter that makes for her liberty.

The earth which is the visible, natural basis of it represents the gross, carnal parts. The element of water answers to the blood, for in it the pulse of the Great World beats: this most men call the flux and reflux, but they know not the true cause of it. The air is the outward refreshing spirit, where this vast creature breathes though invisibly, yet not altogether insensibly.

Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He Himself discovered it. I find God conversant with them, as He was formerly with the patriarchs. He directs them in their travels with a star, as He did the Israelites with a pillar of fire. He informs them of future dangers in their dreams (129)

He did therefore hatch the matter and bring out the secret essences, as a chick is brought out of the shell, whence that other position of the same Zoroaster: "By one single fire is generated all that is." Neither did He only generate them but He also preserves them now, with perpetual efflux of heat and spirit.

She hath several ways to break up house, but her best is without a disease. This is her mystical walk, an exit only to return.

It is an age of intellectual slaveries; If they meet any thing extraordinary, they prune it with distinctions, or daub it with false glosses, til it looks like the traditions of Aristotle. His followers are so confident of his principles they seek not to understand what others speak, but to make others speak what they understand.

It was well that I quitted it at last and walked again into that clear light which I had foolishly forsaken.

Bless'd souls, whose care it was this first to know
And thus the mansions of the light attain:
How credible to hold that minds like these Transcend both human littleness and vice.
If Thou, O Jehovah, my God, wilt enlighten me, darkness shall be made light. p.56

I come out as if there were no hours in the days, nor planets in the hours; Neither do I care for any thing, but that interlude of Perendenga in Michael Cervantes: Let the old Man my Master live, and Christ be with us thus all. Thou wilt wonder now where this drives, Conde de lemos, nor a cardinal to pray for.

Hence thou mayst see what my conceptions were, when I began to write; and now I must tell thee, they are still the same, nor hath my long experience weakened them at all, but invincibly confirmed them.

They are things beyond reasoning sensible, practical truths, not mere vagaries and rambles of the brain.

I have some times seen actions as various as they were great, and my own sullen fate hath forced me to severall courses of life, but I finde not one hitherto which ends not in surfeits or satietie. Let us fansie a man as fortunate as this world can make him; what doth he do but move from bed to board, and provide for the circumstances of those two scenes? To day hee eates and drinkes, then sleeps, that hee may doe the like to morrow.

This is my advice but how welcome to thee I know not.

Notwithstanding I acknowledge the schoolmen ingenious: they conceive their principles irregular, and prescribe rules for method, though they want matter.

It happened in exposing my former discourse to censure, (a custom hath strangled many truths in the cradle) that a learned man suggested to me some bad opinion he had of my author, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. I ever understood it was not one but many in whose sentiment that miracle suffered.