No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother’s love.
There is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home.
Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.
The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor.
As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.
Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. Through all God’s works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the Throne.
Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.
The creed of a true saint is to make the best of life, and to make the most of it.
Physically, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars.
Christ saw much in this world to weep over, and much to pray over; but He saw nothing in it to look upon with contempt.
Conscience is its own readiest accuser.
To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery-into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared.
How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.
It is exceedingly deleterious to withdraw the sanction of religion from amusement. If we feel that it is all injurious we should strip the earth of its flowers and blot out its pleasant sunshine.
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!
The child’s grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man’s sorrow, and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.
A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon’s mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.
The church-bells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity.