Jeremy Collier

"Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from becoming a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."

"A brave mind is always impregnable. True courage is the result of reasoning."

"Atheism is the result of ignorance and pride, of strong sense and feeble reasons, of good eating and ill-living. It is the plague of society, the corrupter of manners, and the underminer of property."

"Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according to the predominancy of the element."

"A man that loves to be peevish and paramount, and to play the sovereign at every turn, does but blast the blessings of life, and swagger away his own enjoyments; and not to enlarge upon the folly, not to mention the injustice of such a behavior, it is always the sign of a little, unbenevolent temper. It is disease and discredit all over, and there is no more greatness in it, than in the swelling of a dropsy."

"A poets mind should be clear and unsullied; and the muses being virgins, their performances should agree with their condition."

"Without discretion, people may be overlaid with unreasonable affection, and choked with too much nourishment."

"Avoid all affectation and singularity. What is according to nature is best, and what is contrary to it is always distasteful. Nothing is graceful that is not our own."

"Of all sorts of flattery, that which comes from a solemn character and stands before a sermon is the worst-complexioned. Such commendation is a satire upon the author, makes the text look mercenary, and disables the discourse from doing service."

"True courage is the result of reasoning. A brave mind is always impregnable. Resolution lies more in the head than in the veins, and a just sense of honor and of infamy, of duty and of religion, will carry us farther than all the force of mechanism."

"The lower your senses are kept, the better you may govern them. Appetite and reason are commonly like two buckets, — when one is at the top, the other is at the bottom. Now of the two, I had rather the reason-bucket be uppermost."

"The size of a mans sense and improvement is discovered by his pleasures as much as by anything else."