Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.

The productions of the press, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snowflakes, but potent as thunder. It is an additional tongue of steam and lightning, by which a man speaks his first thought, his instant argument or grievance, to millions in a day.

Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skeptical

It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.

The true Church is not an institution to be kept apart from the world because the world "is common and unclean," but a vital heart of truth and love, beating with the life of Jesus, and sending abroad its sanctifying pulsations until nothing shall be common and unclean.