Jeremy Taylor
On 15 August 1613, Jeremy Taylor was born in Cambridge, beginning a life that would be spent as a cleric, theologian, and writer in the Kingdom of England.
Taylor worked as an Anglican priest and, in time, reached the rank of bishop. He was also a writer who used the English language in his work. These roles — cleric, bishop, theologian, writer — defined the shape of his career as a citizen of the Kingdom of England. The combination of his priestly office and his work as a writer placed him in more than one sphere of seventeenth-century English life, and his use of English rather than Latin gave his writing a wider potential audience than a strictly scholarly register might have allowed.
Taylor died on 13 August 1667 in Lisburn, two days short of his fifty-fourth birthday. He had served as a bishop and had worked throughout his life as both a cleric and a writer in the English language. The fact that he held episcopal office marks him as someone who reached a senior position within the church before his death in the summer of 1667.
Quotes by Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor's insights on:
Observe thyself as thy greatest enemy would do, so shalt thou be thy greatest friend.
The labor and sweat of our brows are so far from being a curse, that without it, our very bead would not be so great a blessing—If it were not for labor, men could neither eat so much, nor relish be pleasantly, nor sleep so soundly, nor be so healthful, so useful, so strong, so patient, so noble, not so untempted.
Right intention is to the actions of a man what the soul is to the body or the root to the tree.
The private and personal blessings we enjoy—the blessings of immunity, safeguard, liberty and integrity—deserve the thanksgiving of a whole life.
Every degree of recession from the state of grace Christ first put us in is a recession from our hopes.
If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy.
Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment: for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could.
On him that takes revenge, revenge shall be taken, and by a real evil he shall dearly pay for the goods that are but airy and fantastical; it is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.