There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading I would spurn them all.
A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.
The smallest things become great when God requires them of us; they are small only in themselves; they are always great when they are done for God.
Even if no command to pray had existed, our very weakness would have suggested it.
I would have no desire other than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray; pray thyself in me.
Speak, move, act in peace, as if you were in prayer. In truth, this is prayer.
In the light of eternity we shall see that what we desired would have been fatal to us, and that what we would have avoided was essential to our well-being.
Little opportunities should be improved.
Accustom yourself gradually to carry Prayer into all your daily occupation – speak, act, work in peace, as if you were in prayer, as indeed you ought to be.
The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
All wars are civil ones; for it is still man spilling his own blood, tearing out his own bowels.
It is often our own imperfection which makes us reprove the imperfection of others; a sharp-sighted self-love of others.
Most people I ask little from. I try to give them much, and expect nothing in return and I do very well in the bargain.
To pray is to desire; but it is to desire what God would have us desire.
Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others, as, by self-examination, thoroughly to know our own.
God would behold in you a simplicity which will contain so much the more of His wisdom as it contains less of your own.
When tempted, the shortest and surest way is to act like a little child at the breast; when we show it a frightful monster, it shrinks back and buries its face in its mother’s bosom, that it may no longer behold it.
Let us endeavor to commence every enterprise with a pure view to the glory of God, continue it without distraction, and finish it without impatience.
The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure.