Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.
We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God’s help and Christ’s example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.
Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.
Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.
A man’s love for his native land lies deeper than any logical expression, among those pulses of the heart which vibrate to the sanctities of home, and to the thoughts which leap up from his father’s graves.
A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty.
Heaven never defaults. The wicked are sure of their wages, sooner or later.
Nature satisfies my thirst; it feeds my hunger; it finds me clothing; it affords me shelter; it wraps me around when I sleep with beneficent and watchful care; and it takes me at last to its great bosom, where my ashes mingle with their kindred dust.
Mercy. That is the gospel. The whole of it in one word.
We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union – a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God’s truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” or an ascension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf.
A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them – as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself – into the grave, and is forgotten.
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.
Death makes a beautiful appeal to charity. When we look upon the dead form, so composed and still, the kindness and the love that are in us all come forth.