Good Christian people, here lies for you an inestimable loan; take all heed thereof, in all carefulness, employ it: with high recompense, or else with heavy penalty, will it one day be required back.
Rare benevolence, the minister of God.
A noble book! all men’s book!
A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man.
There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.
The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness.
Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.
Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.
Caution is the lower story of prudence.
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
Happy season of childhood! Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man’s hut With auroral radiance; and for thy nursling hast provided a soft swathing of love and infinite hope wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced round by sweetest dreams!
It is a fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with.
At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.
Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay’s, and mere words.
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
Violence does even justice unjustly.
Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.
The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home.