Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.
Yea, though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart, Speedily gloweth it again, warmed by the live embers of hope.
It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work; it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.
People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men.
Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.
The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself. Religion is relative to the individual.
That which distinguishes man from the brute is his power, in dealing with Nature, to milk her laws, and make them give forth their bounty.
You cannot play the hypocrite before God; and to obtain pardon you must cease to sin, as well as to be exercised by a spirit of repentance.
No cradle for an emperor's child was ever prepared with so much magnificence as this world has been made for man. But it is only his cradle.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.
The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day. It is a blessed baptism which gives the first waking thoughts into the bosom of God.
Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.
Little lies are very dangerous, because there are so many of them, and because each one of them scours upon the character as diamond-pointed.
The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.
A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone, for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth.
Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.
Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational; it is well to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads when no other motive will move them.
Self-government by the whole people is the teleologic idea. The republican form of government is the noblest and the best, as it is the latest.
Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him.
Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle.
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
He who only does not appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied like any other man who is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not unlike blindness.
Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.
Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.
Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual; the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life.
When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.
The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
If we are like Christ, we shall seek, not to absorb, but to reflect the light which falls upon others, and thus we shall become pure and spotless.
There is no part of government which cannot better suffer derangement than the ballot. If you strike the ballot with disease, it is heart disease.
The disciples found angels at the grave of Him they loved; and we should always find them too, but that our eyes are too full of tears for seeing.
Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.
Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.
The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life what bells are to horses-not expected to draw the load, but only to jingle while the horses draw.
God made every man to have power to be mightier than the events round about him; to hold by his firm will the reigns by which all things are guided.
Providence is but another name for natural law. Natural law itself would go out in a minute if it were not for the divine thought that is behind it.
A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into this life without the knowledge of how to use them. Education is the process of learning their use.
Nature would be scarcely worth a puff of the empty wind if it were not that all Nature is but a temple, of which God is the brightness and the glory.
There's not much practical Christianity in the man who lives on better terms with angels and seraphs than with his children, servants and neighbours.
When a man has no longer any conception of excellence above his own, his voyage is done, he is dead,--dead in trespasses and sin of blear-eyed vanity.
There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.
The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty.
A man's true estate of power and riches is to be in himself; not in his dwelling or position or external relations, but in his own essential character.