To labor rightly and earnestly is to walk in the golden track that leads to God. It is to adopt the regimen of manhood and womanhood. It is to come into sympathy with the great struggle of humanity toward perfection. It is to adopt the fellowship of all the great and good the world has ever known.
God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.
A man who in the struggles of life has no home to retire to, in fact or in memory, is without life’s best rewards and life’s best defences.
In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.
No genuine observer can decide otherwise than that the homes of a nation are the bulwarks of personal and national safety and thrift.
Posts of honor are evermore posts of danger and of care.
He never said it would be easy, He just said He’d go with me.
God be thanked that there are some in the world to whose hearts the barnacles will not cling.
Childhood may do without a grand purpose, but manhood cannot.
A man in whom religion is an inspiration, who has surrendered his being to its power, who drinks it, breathes it, bathes in it, cannot speak otherwise than religiously.
A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not begun to comprehend the real nature of religion.
Character lives in a man, reputation outside of him.
Why will you be always sallying out to break lances with other people’s wind-mills, when your own is not capable of grinding corn for the horse you ride?
Many men and women spend their lives in unsuccessful attempts to spin the flax God sends them upon a wheel they can never use.
Fashion is aristocratic-autocratic.
So I take my life as I find it, as a life full of grand advantages that are linked indissolubly to my noblest happiness and my everlasting safety. I believe that Infinite Love ordained it, and that, if I bow willingly, tractably, and gladly to its discipline, my Father will take care of it.
The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer’s character.
The faculties of our souls differ as widely as the features of our faces and the forms of our frames.
We work and that is godlike.
Work was made for man, and not man for work. Work is man’s servant, both in its results to the worker and the world. Man is not work’s servant, save as an almost universal perversion has made him such.