Famous Francis Quarles Quotes
“We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil;
We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.”
Book II, no. 2.
Emblems (1635)
“The next way home's the farthest way about.”
Book IV, no. 2, Epigram 2. Compare: "The longest way round is the shortest way home", Bohn, Foreign Proverbs (Italian).
Emblems (1635)
Francis Quarles Quotes about life
Francis Quarles Quotes
“The road to resolution lies by doubt:
The next way home's the farthest way about.”
Book IV, no. 2, Epigram.
Emblems (1635)
“Death aims with fouler spite
At fairer marks.”
Divine Poems (ed. 1669). Compare: "Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow", Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night v. line 1011.
“The slender debt to Nature's quickly paid,
Discharged, perchance, with greater ease than made.”
Book II, no. 13. Compare: "To die is a debt we must all of us discharge", Euripides, Alcestis, line 418.
Emblems (1635)
“The way to bliss lies not on beds of down,
And he that has no cross deserves no crown.”
Esther (1621), Sec. 9, Meditation 9.
“No man is born unto himself alone;
Who lives unto himself, he lives to none.”
Esther (1621), Sec. 1, Meditation 1.
“Shine Son of glory, and my sinnes are gone
Like twinkling Starres before the rising Sunne.”
The Authour's Dreame (1629).
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 609.