Parenting & Family Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Taylor doesn’t bother with sentiment; he threatens you with domestic apocalypse. The line is a miniature sermon in predator imagery: a home without active love becomes a cage, and the person who withholds affection is the one stocking it with meat. “Feeds a lioness” is a brutal reversal of patriarchal comfort. The wife, imagined by a 17th-century Anglican divine as potentially fierce and dangerous, isn’t inherently monstrous; she’s made so by neglect. Love is framed less as a feeling than as household maintenance: fail to provide it and you cultivate teeth.

The second image, “broods a nest of sorrows,” shifts from the drama of a wild animal to the slow, patient labor of incubation. Grief isn’t a lightning strike; it hatches. Taylor’s verbs matter: feed, brood. These are ongoing acts, daily choices, implying that emotional negligence is not passive. You don’t simply “lose” your family’s warmth; you manufacture its replacement: resentment, fear, estrangement.

Context sharpens the intent. Taylor is writing from a world where marriage is a moral institution tied to social order, not personal fulfillment. As a cleric in a post-Reformation England racked by civil conflict, he treats the family as a frontline of stability. The subtext is disciplinary: affection is a duty owed to dependents, and failure carries consequences that will return on the offender. It’s pastoral care delivered with claws, insisting that the private sphere has teeth, and you’re the one sharpening them.