In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands.
Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress.
There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
We should live and labor in our time that what came to us as a seed may go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom, may go to them as fruit. This is what we mean by progress.
To love I must have something I can put my arms around.
If there’s a job to be done, I always ask the busiest man in my parish to take it on and it gets done.
Of all formal things in the world, a clipped hedge is the most formal; and of all the informal things in the world, a forest tree is the most informal.
Love is more just than justice.
It is the very wantonness of folly for a man to search out the frets and burdens of his calling and give his mind every day to a consideration of them. They belong to human life. They are inevitable. Brooding only gives them strength.
No one thing does human life more need than a kind consideration of the faults of others. Every one sins; everyone needs forbearance. Our own imperfections should teach us to be merciful.
Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.
In regard to the great mass of men, anything that breaks the realm of fear is not salutary, but dangerous; because it takes off one of the hoops that hold the barrel together in which the evil spirits are confined.
No church can be prospered in which all the ministration comes from the pulpit.
What could make me love my fellow Christian better than to see that God loves us all as we were all one soul?
Spreading Christianity abroad is sometimes an excuse for not having it at home.
When a church is faithless to its duties, the real church is outside its walls, in the community.
The church is no more religion than the masonry of the aqueduct is the water that flows through it.
Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.
There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man’s conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.
Learning, to be of much use, must have a tendency to spread itself among the common people.