When flowers are full of heaven-descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full.
I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.
Fear is the soul’s signal for rallying.
Mirthfulness is in the mind and you cannot get it out. It is just as good in its place as conscience or veneration.
There is no such thing as white lies; a lie is as black as a coalpit, and twice as foul.
There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.
Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
The whole of the Saviour’s ministerial life, at least the part of it that stands on record, was passed in what we may call substantially a revival work.
And now we beseech of Thee that we may have every day some such sense of God’s mercy and of the power of God about us, as we have of the fullness of the light of heaven before us.
Like the cellar-growing vine is the Christian who lives in the darkness and bondage of fear. But let him go forth, with the liberty of God, into the light of love, and he will be like the plant in the field, healthy, robust, and joyful.
If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs no further argument of His divinity.
The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox but the ox becomes a lion.
Evil men of every degree will use you, flatter you, lead you on until you are useless; then, if the virtuous do not pity you, or God compassionate, you are without a friend in the universe.
We cannot have right virtue without right conditions.
God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.
Thorough selfishness destroys or paralyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by the contest for wealth is like a citadel stormed in war, utterly shattered.
John Wesley quaintly observed that the road to heaven is a narrow path, not intended for wheels, and that to ride in a coach here and to go to heaven hereafter, was a happiness too much for man.
But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age.
You cannot play the hypocrite before God; and to obtain pardon you must cease to sin, as well as to be exercised by a spirit of repentance.
There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.