Men go shopping just as men go out fishing or hunting, to see how large a fish may be caught with the smallest hook.
A gamester, as such, is the cool, calculating, essential spirit of concentrated, avaricious selfishness.
Morality is good, and is accepted of God, as far as it goes; but the difficulty is, it does not go far enough.
Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.
Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.
Many men want wealth, – not a competence alone, but a live-story competence. Everything subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off by and by the bolts of Divine wrath.
If there be any one whose power is in beauty, in purity, in goodness, it is a woman.
If a man has come to that point where he is no content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state in which he ought to be changed into a mummy.
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself, and a mean man, by one lower than himself.
All work and no plagiarism makes for dull sermons!
Love is not a possession but a growth. The heart is a lamp with just oil enough to burn for an hour, and if there be no oil to put in again its light will go out. God’s grace is the oil that fills the lamp of love.
Pain is God’s midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.
To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.
Truthfulness is godliness.
Good-nature is one of the richest fruits of true Christianity.
I will not say it is not Christian to make beads of others faults, and tell them over every day; I say it is infernal. If you want to know how the Devil feels, you do know, if you are such an one.
As warmth makes even glaciers trickle, and opens streams in the ribs of frozen mountains, so the heart knows the full flow and life of its grief only when it begins to melt and pass away.
Were one to ask me in which direction I think man strongest, I should say, his capacity to hate.
It will not do to be saints at meeting and sinners everywhere else.
Think of a man in a chronic state of anger!