Lying

15 Then Sarah denied, saying, I
laughed not; for she was afraid. And
he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.

—Genesis 18:15

Can someone make this into an Elizabethan comedy? My skills are wanting. The following scene is also delightful: 

— Abraham: Peradventure there shall be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?
—  the LORD: Nay I say; If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city walls, therein I will spare all the place for their sakes.
— Abraham: [speaking unto himself] Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes, but of His patience we shall take a sip: [back to the LORD] Peradventure there shall lack forty of the fifty righteous: wilt thou then destroy all the city for lack of forty?
— the LORD: Nay again, I tell thee, thou king-to-be; If I find in Sodom but five of the righteous within the city, yea, I will spare all the place for their sakes.
— Abraham: [to himself] Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but once more: [back to the LORD] Peradventure one shall be found there.
— the LORD: I will lend it to thee this one time, that marginal returns be so minuscule... Nay, I will not destroy it for one's sake!
[exeunt the LORD]

"Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, when he had learned it"

Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,

          Accents uncertain:

"Time to taste life," another would have said,

          "Up with the curtain!"

This man said rather, "Actual life comes next?

          Patience a moment!

Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text,

          Still there's the comment.

Let me know all! Prate not of most or least,

          Painful or easy!

Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast,

          Ay, nor feel queasy."

Oh, such a life as he resolved to live,

          When he had learned it,

When he had gathered all books had to give!

          Sooner, he spurned it.

Image the whole, then execute the parts

          Fancy the fabric

Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,

          Ere mortar dab brick! 

—A Grammarian's Funeral, Robert Browning

Crazy Jane and Lady Chatterley

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

`Those breasts are flat and fallen now

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.'

`Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,' I cried.

'My friends are gone, but that's a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart's pride.

`A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.'

—Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop, W.B. Yeats

Words for music perhaps and other poems (1932)

Taken from the preface letter by Archibald MacLeish in the unabridged 1959 Grove edition of Lady Chatterley, with some other gems:

The purpose of the book is manifestly pure: pure as being the high purpose of a serious artist; pure as being the cleansing purpose of a social reformer who hates lechery and sexual morbidity as he hates the devil himself. Lawrence's purpose here is the cleansing purpose of freeing humanity from the domination, which seemed to him evil, of the abstract intellect and sterile will by a return to the natural life of the body and the senses. His enemies are hypocrisy and intellectualism and sham. His admiration is for wholeness and awareness and life. One may or may not agree with Lawrence's estimate of the saving power of the senses and of natural sex in particular, or with his judgment of the destroying power of "the life of the mind", but it is impossible to question honestly the purity of his motive.

Reading Hobbes (III)

"For the prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratical or democratical assembly cometh not from aristocracy, nor from democracy, but from the obedience and concord of the subjects; nor do the people flourish in a monarchy because one man has the right to rule them, but because they obey him."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap. xxx Of the Office of the Sovereign Representative [7])

Reading Hobbes (II)

"Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdom in matter of government are disposed to ambition, because without public employment in council or magistracy the honour of their wisdom is lost. And therefore eloquent speakers are inclined to ambition; for eloquence seemeth wisdom, both to themselves and others."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap. xi Of the Difference of Manners [13])

"For I doubt not but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap. xi Of the Difference of Manners [21])

Reading Hobbes (i)

"So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap ii. Of Imagination [3])

"The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap iv. Of Speech [1])

"For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man."

—Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

(Chap iv. Of Speech [13])

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