I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.
I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood .
Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.
I could never fear a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he flung me there because I refused. There is a power stronger than such a one; and it is possible to walk unscathed even in the burning furnace.
In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.
Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.
I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.
Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.
Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.
For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light.
It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with.
There are at bottom but two possible religions – that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.
Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.
The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower.
There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.
The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God’s organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.
Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.
In every department of life – in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections – we thank God that we are not like our fathers.