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Adversity, if for no other reason, is of benefit, since it is sure to bring a season of sober reflection. People see clearer at such times. Storms purify the atmosphere.
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Rich men are to bear the infirmities of the poor. Wise men are to bear the mistakes of the ignorant. Strong men are to bear with the feeble. Cultured people are to bear with the rude and vulgar. If a rough and coarse man meets an ecstatically fine man, the man that is highest up is to be the servant of the man that is lowest down.
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The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.
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Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone; he would have the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!
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There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.
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Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!
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The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
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Flowers may beckon todwards us, but they speak todward heaven and God.
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A very common flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives joy to the poor, to the rude, and to the multitudes who could have no flowers were nature to charge a price for her blossoms.
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There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world,--a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills. Men take one who has offended, and set him down before the blowpipe of their indignation, and scorch him, and burn his fault into him; and when they have kneaded him sufficiently with their fiery fists, then--they forgive him.
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There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those, who will.
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God planted fear in the soul as truly as he planted hope or courage. Pear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying.
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Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence. Henry Ward Beecher
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It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.
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If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
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Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.
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Brethren, we are all sailing home; and by and by, when we are not thinking of it, some shadowy thing (men call it death), at midnight, will pass by, and will call us by name, and will say, "I have a message for you from home; God wants you; heaven waits for you.
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A mother's prayers, silent and gentle, can never miss the road to the throne of all bounty.
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If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him, It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.
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No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
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Spreading Christianity abroad is sometimes an excuse for not having it at home.
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Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.
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That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
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The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie.