We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God’s reluctance, but taking hold of God’s willingness.
Death is strong, but Life is stronger...
Anger is self-immolation.
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to.
There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow merely thankful for belief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with, and trust in, Him who has released us.
When you discover you’ve been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.
No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.
Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.
Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.
Wherever, in any world, a soul, by free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God’s likeness, it is set into the growing walls, a living stone.
Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.
To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.
Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.
Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.
Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now... Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
We feel the thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
Every time we see a man who has attained our human ideal a little more fully than we have, it wakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings.
If you hold a rose up before a man and he shuts his eyes tight and just holds out his hands and says “Here, I am ready to be persuaded; convince me by touch that your rose is red;” then you are helpless.