Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.

The virtue of Paganism was strength: the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together.

Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

Nothing good bursts forth all at once. The lightning may dart out of a black cloud; but the day sends his bright heralds before him, to prepare the world for his coming.

What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities.