Joshua

“How miserable must those be who complain for want of amusement! How wretched such a state! What! want matter for thought? Can a thinking being, such as man is, say thus? Look round, is not all nature about thee teeming with subjects well adapted for thy contemplation, happily prepared for thy entertainment?”
― Unca Eliza Winkfield, Female American

“There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter--things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite.”
― Samuel Butler

“Be virtuous' says the copy-book, 'and you will be happy.' Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this respect it is only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice brings no very serious mischief on a man's later years it is not so bad a vice as it is said to be.”
― Samuel Butler

“Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies; and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut all up. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets or first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.”
― Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall: Or a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk