"Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good."
"Alack our life, so beautiful to see, With how much ease life losest, in a day, What many years with pain and toil amassed!"
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Source: Epistola ad Posteros [Letter to Posterity] in Petrarch : The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters by James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe, (p. 59), 1898.
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"Love is the crowning grace of humanity."
"Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace."
"And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not."
"Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us."
"Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy."