Explore Quotes by John Selden

The happiness of married life depends upon making small sacrifices with readiness and cheerfulness.

First, in your sermons, use your logic, and then your rhetoric; Rhetoric without logic, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet more are taken with rhetoric than logic, because they are caught with fine expressions when they understand not reason.

Philosophy is nothing but discretion.

There is no book on which we can rest in a dying moment but the Bible.

Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up dignity. In gluttony there must be eating, in drunkenness there must be drinking; 'tis not the eating, and 'tis not the drinking that must be blamed, but the excess. So in pride.

'Tis not the eating, nor 'tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess.

Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.

Idolatry is in a man's own thought, not in the opinion of another.

Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up his dignity.

While you are upon earth, enjoy the good things that are here (to that end were they given), and be not melancholy, and wish yourself in heaven.

A glorious Church is like a magnificent feast; there is all the variety that may be, but every one chooses out a dish or two that he likes, and lets the rest alone: how glorious soever the Church is, every one chooses out of it his own religion, by which he governs himself, and lets the rest alone.

Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.

To preach long, loud, and Damnation, is the way to be cried up. We love a man that damns us, and we run after him again to save us.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

I have taken much pains to know everything that is esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my reading, nothing now remains to comfort me at the close of this life but this passage of St. Paul: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." To this I cleave, and herein do I find rest.

If the prisoner should ask the judge whether he would be content to be hanged, were he in his case, he would answer no. Then, says the prisoner, do as you would be done to.

Abundance consists not alone in material possession, but in an uncovetous spirit.

Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice; and yet everybody is content to hear.

Of all the actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people, yet of all the actions of our lives, 'tis the most meddled with by other people.

We pick out a text here and there to make it serve our turn; whereas , if we take it all together, and considered what went before and what followed after, we should find it meant no such thing.

Pleasures are all alike simply considered in themselves: he that hunts, or he that governs the commonwealth, they both please themselves alike, only we commend that, whereby we ourselves receive some benefit.