Joseph Hall
Joseph Hall
Joseph Hallwas an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth1 July 1574
running exercise body
Our body is a well-set clock, which keeps good time, but if it be too much or indiscreetly tampered with, the alarm runs out before the hour.
care god-love adverbs
God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well.
laziness desperate dare
Those that dare lose a day, ate dangerously prodigal; those that dare misspend it, are desperate.
spiritual distance eye
Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little,-diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God's mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness.
passion men fool
Nothing doth so fool a man as extreme passion. This doth make them fools which otherwise are not, and show them to be fools which are so.
evil unity neutrality
Neutrality in things good or evil is both odious and prejudicial; but in matters of an indifferent nature is safe and commendable. Herein taking of parts maketh sides, and breaketh unity. In an unjust cause of separation, he that favoreth both parts may perhaps have least love of either side, but hath most charity in himself.
suffering strive found
I will rather suffer a thousand wrongs than offer one. I have always found that to strive with a superior is injurious; with an equal, doubtful; with an inferior, sordid and base; with any, full of unquietness.
taken eye care
The malcontent is neither well, full nor fasting; and though he abounds with complaints, yet nothing dislikes him but the present; for what he condemns while it was, once passed, he magnifies and strives to recall it out of the jaw of time. What he hath he seeth not, his eyes are so taken up with what he wants; and what he sees he careth not for, because be cares so much for that which is not.
evil used worst
Even the best things ill used become evils; and, contrarily, the worst things used well prove good.
trying use benevolence
Try to be of some use to others.
running cutting men
As the most generous vine, if it is not pruned, runs out into many superfluous stems, and grows at last weak and fruitless; so dote the best man, if he be not cut short of his desires and pruned with afflictions. If it be painful to bleed, it is worse to wither. Let me be pruned, that I may grow, rather than be cut up to burn.
eye mind ears
The ear and the eye are the mind's receivers; but the tongue is only busy in expending the treasures received. It, therefore, the revenues of the mind be uttered as fast or faster than they are received, it must needs be bare, and can never lay up for purchase.
sea earth pearls
There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen, nor never shall be.
doctrine application
The life of doctrine is in application.