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Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.
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Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.
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If one should give me a dish of sand, and tell me there were particles of iron in it, I might look for them with my eyes, and search for them with my clumsy fingers, and be unable to detect them; but let me take a magnet and sweep through it, and how would it draw to itself the almost invisible particles by the mere power of attraction. The unthankful heart, like my finger in the sand, discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day, and as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some Heavenly blessings.
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No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
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Flattery is praise insincerely given for an interested purpose.
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Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
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Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
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What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.
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A man's true estate of power and riches is to be in himself; not in his dwelling or position or external relations, but in his own essential character.
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Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it.
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Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
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Love without faith is as bad as faith without love.
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It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.
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Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to spread itself among the common people.
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No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it.
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Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.
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Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
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Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational; it is well to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads when no other motive will move them.
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A man who does not love praise is not a full man.
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To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe. Not alone when they are in their glory, but in whatever state they are - in leaf, or rimed with frost, or powdered with snow, or crystal-sheathed in ice, or in severe outline stripped and bare against a November sky - we love them.
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We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
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In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
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Religion is using everything for God.
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When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.