“The miserable have no other medicineBut only hope:I have hope to live, and am prepared to die.”

“It is silliness to live when to live is torment, and then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician.”

“The summer's flower is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die”

“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”

“Haply for I am black,And have not those soft parts of conversationThat chamberers have; or for I am declinedInto the vale of years—yet that’s not much— She’s gone. I am abused, and my reliefMust be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,That we can call these delicate creatures oursAnd not their appetites! I had rather be a toadAnd live upon the vapor of a dungeonThan keep a corner in the thing I loveFor others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague of great ones;Prerogatived are they less than the base.’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death.”

“Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore, should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were no sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive the day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.”

“They that have power to hurt and will do none,That do not do the thing they most do show,Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,They rightly do inherit Heaven's graces,And husband nature's riches from expense;They are the lords and owners of their faces,Others but stewards of their excellence.The summer's flow'r is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die;But if that flow'r with base infection meet,The basest weed outbraves his dignity:For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”