Thomas Traherne Quotes

I will not by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings advance you to glory: but by the gentle ways of peace and love.

To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable: to love all is glorious.

Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold, and kings in scepters, you can never enjoy the world.

This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God's righteous Kingdom.

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.

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.

You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.

The sense itself was I. I felt no dross or matter in my soul, no brims or borders, such as in a bowl we see. My essence was capacity.

You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

Principles are like a seed in the ground; they must continually be visited with heavenly influences or else your life will be a barren field.

We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us.

To think well is to serve God in the interior court.

Souls are God's jewels.

Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

How like an angel came I down!

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

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?

Be sensible of your wants, that you maybe sensible of your treasures.

Why is this soe long detaind in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, & a Universal Blessing?

The Soul is shriveled up and buried in a grave that does not love.

Natural things are glorious, and to know them is glorious.

Sleep is cousin-german unto death: Sleep and death differ, no more, than a carcass And a skeleton.

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.

Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love to others, and others love to us.