John Webster

As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils.

You know what whore is. Next the devil adultery,Enters the devil murder.

Fortune__ a right whore:If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,That she may take away all at one swoop.

Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.

Take it for words. O woman__ poor revenge,Which dwells but in the tongue!

Believing can mean something a good deal less than certainty. I believe the bus will come in five minutes, but I can__ be sure. Or sometimes it can mean the kind of knowledge which is acquired after scrupulous review of evidence to build up a cumulative case for some conviction. But believing [as Scripture presents it] is not half-certainty, nor the fruit of mental effort. It__ belief in the deep, strong sense of giving allegiance to something which overwhelms us. To believe in the Lord Jesus_is to do far more than simply give him a passing nod with the mind or even to honor him with our religious devotion. It__ the astonished business of being so overthrown by his reality, so mastered by his sheer presence, so judged by him, that we can do nothing other than acknowledge that he is supremely real, supremely true. To believe in him is to confess him__o affirm with mind and will and heart that he fills all things, that our only hope lies in his name. ¶ Belief in this sense concerns the entire shape of a personal life. It embraces the whole of us. It__ not one department of our life, something in which we engage alongside all the other things we do__orking, loving, hoping, creating, worrying, and so on. Believing is about the way in which we dispose the world of our existence. We believe when we__e totally shaped by something outside of us, acknowledging that it has put a decisive stamp on all that we are and all that we do. This is why belief in this deep, strong sense defines us completely: We__e __elievers,_ doing all that we do out of the inescapable conviction that the Lord Jesus is the persistent factor in the whole of our life. Believing in him, confessing him, involves no less than everything.

Our believing has no power of itself; we certainly aren__ saved by belief. We__e saved by the grace and goodness and majesty of him in whom we believe__y the one whom we confess as we believe. In a real sense, our belief is nothing in and of itself. It__ simply a looking to him, a listening to him, in which we are wholly absorbed by that which we see and hear.

O that I were a man, or that I had powerTo execute my apprehended wishes!I would whip some with scorpions.

Princes give rewards with their own hands,But death or punishment by the hands of other.

What a strange creature is a laughing fool,As if a man were created to no useBut only to show his teeth.

Lay this unto your breast: Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best.

Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together.

'Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

What! because we are poor Shall we be vicious?

Lovers die inward that their flames conceal.

Integrity of life is fame's best friend,Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lustLike diamonds we are cut with our own dust