Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.
Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration – the secret alembics of vitality.
Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.
There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child’s face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory.
Swift calls discretion low prudence; it is high prudence, and one of the most important elements entering into either social or political life.
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.
Impatience never commanded success.
Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
The worst effect of sin is within and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.
However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another’s doubt.
There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.
Do not ask if a man has been through college; ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university.
Neutral men are the devil’s allies.
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.