“That which attracts the world must please and pander to the self-importance of man. The world itself is a vain show, and likes its own. Consequently there is nothing which so carries the mass of men along with it as that which flatters the vanity of the human mind. It may assume the lowliest air, but sinful man seeks his own honour and present exaltation.”

“I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come.”

“Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.”

“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion:”

“‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?...The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.”

“But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea.”

“He that hangs himself is a virgin: virginity murders itself, and should be buried in highways, out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by’t! Out with’t! within the year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse. Away with ’t!”