Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?

Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite-a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.

I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

The golden age is not in the past, but in the future; not in the origin of human experience, but in its consummate flower; not opening in Eden, but out from Gethsemane.

How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into affairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay.

The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.