-
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.
-
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!
-
God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.
-
Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness. . . . But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them.
-
Like a bird she seems to wear gay plumage unconsciously, as if it grew upon her.
-
Take from the Bible the Godship of Christ, and it would be but a heap of dust.
-
Pushing any truth out very far, you are met by a counter-truth.
-
Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
-
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
-
The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
-
Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.
-
Next to victory, there is nothing so sweet as defeat, if only the right adversary overcomes you.
-
A mother is as different from anything else that God ever thought of, as can possibly be. She is a distinct and individual creation.
-
Not thine the sorrow, but ours, sainted soul! Thou hast indeed entered into the promised land, while we are yet on the march. To us remain the rocking of the deep, the storm upon the land, days of duty and nights of watching; but thou are sphered high above all darkness and fear, beyond all sorrow and weariness. Rest, oh, weary heart!
-
The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
-
Riches without law are more dangerous than is poverty without law.
-
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
-
If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
-
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.
-
Human life is God's outer church. Its needs and urgencies are priests and pastors.
-
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life.
-
Death? Translated into the heavenly tongue, that word means life!
-
The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.