The city an epitome of the social world. All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues. It contains the products of every moral zone. It is cosmopolitan, not only in a national, but a spiritual sense.
It is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill.
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth – the true poet is very near the oracle.
Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.
In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.
Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it and tried.
The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished and glorified through the furnaces of tribulation.
There are daily martyrdoms occurring of more or less self-abnegation, and of which the world knows nothing.
Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman.
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own.
Home is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.
Many a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes.
Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.
Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.
If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness – to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.
I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.
Christ illustrates the purport of life as He descends from His transfiguration to toil, and goes forward to exchange that robe of heavenly brightness for the crown of thorns.
Break up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity.
If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.