Flat and flexible truths are beat out by every hammer; But Vulcan and his whole forge sweat to work out Achilles his armour. - Thomas Browne

It is a barbarous part of inhumanity to adde unto any afflicted parties misery, or endeavour to multiply in any man a passion, whose single nature is already above his patience; this was the greatest affliction of Job, and those oblique expostulations of his friends a deeper injury than the downe-right blowes of the Devill.

Lastly, If length of Days be thy Portion, make it not thy Expectation: rekon not upon long Life, but live always beyond thy Account. He that so often surviveth his Expectations, lives many lives, and will hardly complain of the shortness of his Days. Time past is gone like a shadow; make Times to come, present; conceive that near which may be far off; approximate thy last times by present Apprehensions of them: live like a Neighbour unto Death, and think that there is but little to come. And since there is something in us that must live on, joyn both lives together; unite them in thy Thoughts and Actions, and live in one but for the other. He who thus ordereth the Purposes of this Life, will never be far from the next; and is in some manner already in it, by an happy Conformity, and close Apprehension of it.

All flesh is grasse, is not onely metaphorically, but literally true, for all those creatures which we behold, are but the hearbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves. Nay further, we are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee look upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves and yet do live and remaine our selves.