The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind’s eye and our heart’s eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it.
When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.
Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.
Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.
How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.
The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.
Every wise man lives in an observatory.
Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law...
The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.
I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.
The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest.
We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.
How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered.
They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.
Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.
Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon.