Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamps, that those afar off on the seas may see the shining, and learn their way.
I beseech you to correct one fault – severe speech of others; never speak evil of any man, no matter what the facts may be.
If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.
The methods by which men have met and conquered trouble, or been slain by it, are the same in every age.
The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.
There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman; and of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother.
There is not a person we employ who does not, like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, forbearance, patience.
The elect, those who will; the non-elect, those who won’t.
Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.
When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.
Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.
Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
Titles are too “thin” for the nineteenth century.
The religion that fosters intolerance needs another Christ to die for it.
Give us that calm certainty of truth, that nearness to Thee, that conviction of the reality of the life to come, which we shall need to bear us through the troubles of this.
When a man has no longer any conception of excellence above his own, his voyage is done, he is dead, – dead in trespasses and sin of blear-eyed vanity.
Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations.
The pen is the tongue of the hand; a silent utterer of words for the eye.
It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. We can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds.