Every man who can be a first-rate something – as every man can be who is a man at all – has no right to be a fifth-rate something; for a fifth-rate something is not better than a first-rate nothing.
Play is a sacred thing, a divine ordinance, for developing in the child a harmonious and healthy organism, and preparing that organism for the commencement of the work of life.
Play may not have so high a place in the divine economy, but is has as legitimate a place as prayer.
Assertion of truths known and felt, promulgation of truth from the high platform of truth itself, declaration of faith by the mouth of moral conviction – this is the New Testament method, and the true one.
The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.
All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness.
How long must the church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work, and that all this immeasurable feeding without action and work is a positive damage to it – that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout, and debility.
A man may carry the whole scheme of Christian truth in his mind from boyhood to old age without the slightest effect upon his character and aims. It has had less influence than the multiplication table.
I have learned that to do one’s next duty is to take a step toward all that is worth possessing.
Of all the scamps society knows, the traditional good fellow is the most despicable.
We live in the future. Even the happiness of the present is made up mostly of that delightful discontent which the hope of better things inspires.
The man who loves home best, and loves it most unselfishly, loves his country best.
It is only rogues who feel the restraints of law.
The moment that law is destroyed, liberty is lost, and men, left free to enter upon the domains of each other, destroy each other’s rights, and invade the field of each other’s liberty.
Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul.
The fact is that sin is the most unmanly thing in God’s world. You never were made for sin and selfishness. You were made for love and obedience.
A man does not necessarily sin who does that which our reason and our conscience condemn.
Every man’s powers have relation to some kind of work; and whenever he finds that kind of work which he can do best – that to which his powers are best adapted – he finds that which will give him the best development, and that by which he can best build up, or make, his manhood.
It is better to be a self-made man, – filled up according to God’s original pattern, – than to be half a man, made after some other man’s pattern.
All who become men of power reach their estate by the same self-mastery, the same self-adjustment to circumstances, the same voluntary exercise and discipline of their faculties, and the same working of their life up to and into their high ideals of life.
The faculty of self-help is that which distinguished man from animals; that it is the Godlike element, or holds within itself the Godlike element, of his constitution.