Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.
Thomas Traherne
The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.
idleness action rest soul vain taste made
Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love to others, and others love to us.
true world love
This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God's righteous Kingdom.
theatre world kingdom righteous visible
Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels.
rights world earth heaven morning angels enjoyment air celestial
To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.
places life wisdom imagination happiness world present place important madmen
Happiness was not made to be boasted, but enjoyed. Therefore tho others count me miserable, I will not believe them if I know and feel myself to be happy; nor fear them.
happiness fear happy feel count miserable made
Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?
world strange mysteries learned books
self love
More company increases happiness, but does not lighten or diminish misery.
happiness company misery
To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable: to love all is glorious.
person poor miserable love
This moment exhibits infinite space, but there is a space also wherein all moments are infinitely exhibited, and the everlasting duration of infinite space is another region and room of joys.
moment moments space infinite
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.
paradise world sweet adam child curious
Let those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways. Before they can either speak or go.
parenting christian-living
Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, He must be born again and become a little child that will enter in the Kingdom of Heaven is deeper far than is generally believed. It is only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended. For we must disrobe infant-like and clear; the powers of our soul free from the leaven of this world, and disentangled from men's conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs, and opinions of men in this world, as if we were but little children. So those things would appear to us only which do to children when they are first born. Ambitions, trades, luxuries, inordinate affections, casual and accidental riches invented since hte fall, would be gone, and only those things appear, which did to Adam in Paradise, in the same light and in the same colours: God in His works, Glory in the light, Love in our parents, men, ourselves, and the face of Heaven: Every man naturally seeing those things, to the enjoyment of which he is naturally born.
christian-living
You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.
metaphysics
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