Miserable Men Commiserate Not Themselves;

A Man May Be In As Just Possession Of The Truth As Of A City, And Yet Be Forced To Surrender.

Gold Once Out Of The Earth Is No More Due Unto It; What Was Unreasonably Committed To The Ground, Is Reasonably Resumed From It; Let Monuments And Rich Fabricks, Not Riches, Adorn Men's Ashes.

Whosoever Enjoys Not This Life, I Count Him But An Apparition, Though He Wear About Him The Sensible Affections Of Flesh. In These Moral Acceptions, The Way To Be Immortal Is To Die Daily.

And Surely, He That Hath Taken The True Altitude Of Things, And Rightly Calculated The Degenerate State Of This Age, Is Not Like To Envy Those That Shall Live In The Next, Much Less Three Or Four Hundred Years Hence, When No Man Can Comfortably Imagine What Face This World Will Carry.

To Call Ourselves A Microcosme, Or Little World, I Thought It Onely A Pleasant Trope Of Rhetorick, Till My Neare Judgement And Second Thoughts Told Me There Was A Reall Truth Therein: For First Wee Are A Rude Masse, And In The Ranke Of Creatures, Which Only Are, And Have A Dull Kinde Of Being Not Yet Priviledged With Life, Or Preferred To Sense Or Reason; Next We Live The Life Of Plants, The Life Of Animals, The Life Of Men, And At Last The Life Of Spirits, Running On In One Mysterious Nature Those Five Kinds Of Existence, Which Comprehend The Creatures Not Onely Of World, But Of The Universe.