Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IX, Line 167. Compare Robert Burns, To a Mountain Daisy: "Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate / Full on thy bloom".

“He weeps! the falling drop puts out the sun; He sighs! the sigh earth's deep foundation shakes. If in His love so terrible, what then His wrath inflamed?”

Edward Young

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 271.

“One to destroy, is murder by the law;
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands takes a specious name,
War's glorious art, and gives immortal fame.”

Edward Young

Satire VII, l. 55.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

“An undevout astronomer is mad.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IX, Line 771.

“The booby father craves a booby son,
And by Heaven’s blessing thinks himself undone.”

Edward Young

Satire II, l. 165.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

“On reason build resolve,
that column of true majesty in man.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night I, Line 30.

“Time flies, death urges, knells call, Heaven invites,
Hell threatens.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 292.

“Ah! what is human life?
How, like the dial's tardy-moving shade,
Day after day slides from us unperceiv'd!
The cunning fugitive is swift by stealth;
Too subtle is the movement to be seen;
Yet soon the hour is up—and we are gone.”

Edward Young

Busiris (1719), Act V, sc. i.

“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 843.

“As Love alone can exquisitely bless,
Love only feels the marvellous of pain;
Opens new veins of torture in the soul,
And wakes the nerve where agonies are born.”

Edward Young

The Brothers (1753), Act V, scene i.

“The chamber where the good man meets his fate
Is privileg’d beyond the common walk
Of virtuous life, quite in the verge of heaven.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 633.

“There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.”

Edward Young

Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) p. 28.