The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.
What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept of the stretch.
Pity is like eating mustard without beef.
The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men.
Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.
Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.
Only when the voice of duty is silent, or when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the consequences of a particular action.
To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise.
A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.
It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.
It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.
Nothing good bursts forth all at once. The lightning may dart out of a black cloud; but the day sends his bright heralds before him, to prepare the world for his coming.
Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life’s recollections.
Friendship is love without its flowers or veil.
A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions.
Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.
The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.
Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away.
The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it.