Precious in the sight of the L isthe death of his saints.

-Bible (Old Testament)
ORDPsalms116:15.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter- writing.

-Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans
  Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 8  Jun. Collected in G S Haight (ed)  The George Eliot Letters (1954), vol.2.

It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! Theyare always implying 'I am capable of higher things.'

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
  Abinger Harvest,'Ronald Firbank'.

What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude.

-Pritchett, Sir V(ictor) S(awdon)
  The Myth Makers,'Chekhov'.

   Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!

-Sterne, Laurence
  A SentimentalJourney,'The Bourbonnois'.

   Where iss it, where iss it: my Precious, my Precious? It's ours, it is, and we wants it.

-Tolkien,J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel)
  Gollum.TheTwoTowers, ch.1.