You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.

[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.

Music has been called the speech of the angels; I will go farther and call it the speech of God Himself.

What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.

There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.

I do not want merely to possess a faith, I want a faith that possesses me.