Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.
Humility is not a weak and timid quality; it must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit.
Let every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.
A day! It has risen upon us from the great deep of eternity, girt round with wonder; emerging from the womb of darkness; a new creation of life and light spoken into being by the word of God.
Munificent nature follows the methods of the divine and true, and rounds all things to her perfect law. While nations are convulsed with blood and violence, how quietly the grass grows.
The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction.
God’s work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man’s will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.
Character has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence.
Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.
A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring.
It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.
Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.
If you should take the human heart and listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns.
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature.
Some souls are ennobled and elevated by seeming misfortunes, which then become blessings in disguise.
Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.
There are interests by the sacrifice of which peace is too dearly purchased. One should never be at peace to the shame of his own soul – to the violation of his integrity or of his allegiance to God.
I will tell you where there is power: where the dew lies upon the hills, and the rain has moistened the roots of the various plant; where the sunshine pours steadily; where the brook runs babbling along, there is a beneficent power.