All our other faculties seem to have the brown touch of earth upon them, but the imagination carries the very livery of heaven, and is God’s self in the soul.
Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.
Religion would save a man; Christ would make him worth saving.
Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.
Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw more from them as wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and bones.
There is an ugly kind of forgiveness in this world – a kind of hedgehog forgiveness, shot out like quills.
God’s grace is the oil that fills the lamp of love.
Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.
Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.
Though cares and sorrows e’er must come, Though heart be rent, I know that God will give me strength, When mine is spent.
When the old creeds are threadbare, and worn through, And all too narrow for the broadening soul, Give me the fine, firm texture of the new, Fair, beautiful and whole!
Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.
The mischiefs of anarchy have been equaled by the mischiefs of government.
If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping-places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.
Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or flower-pot.
The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.
Blessed are the happiness-makers! Blessed are they that take away attritions, that remove friction, that make the courses of life smooth, and the intercourse of men gentle!
Troubles loom up big when they’re ahead, And joys seem always sweeter when they’re past.
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
Life is full of amusement to an amusing man.