No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.
As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.
We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.
As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.
He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
On the face of it, it must be a bad cause which will not bear discussion. Truth seeks light instead of shunning it.
Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.
There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper.
Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.
Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
Knowledge has its boundary line, where it abuts on ignorance; on the outside of that boundary line are ignorance and miracles; on the inside of it are science and no miracles.
To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is.
Love must be the same in all worlds.
Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders.
He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead.
The earth endured Christ’s ministry only three years; – not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.
The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.
Benevolence is a world of itself – a world which mankind, as yet, have hardly begun to explore. We have, as it were, only skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, without penetrating the recesses, or gathering the riches of its vast interior.
The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but himself is the chief loser. The world’s scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of his own perfidy is undying.
There is nothing derogatory in any employment which ministers to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit that is carried into an employment that elevates or degrades it.