Robert Wever quote: “The Prologue of the Messenger. For as much as man is naturally prone To evil from his youth, as Scripture doth recite…”

“For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Source: To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1618), Lines 55 - 70
Context: Yet must I not give nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine arc) and strike the second heat
Upon the muses anvil; turn the fame,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet's made, as well as born.
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true filed lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.

“God doth not promise here to man that He
Will free him quickly from his misery;
But in His own time, and when He thinks fit,
Then He will give a happy end to it.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"God's Time Must End Our Trouble".
Hesperides (1648)

“The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little — or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Source: An Autobiography (1883), Ch. 10

“As a general rule, all that has been hitherto advanced respecting the nature of this deity, must be understood to refer to his properties: for the nature of the god is not one thing, and his influence another: and truly, besides these two, his energy a third thing: seeing that all things which he wills, these he is, he can, and he works. For neither doth he will that which he is not; nor is he without strength to do that which he wills; nor doth he will that which he cannot effect.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Now this is very different in the case of men, for theirs is a double nature mixed up in one, that of soul and body; the former divine, the latter full of darkness and obscurity: hence naturally arise warfare and discord between the two.
Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)