We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.

To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery-into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared.

Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman, I care not what his stamp may be in society; I care not what clothes he wears, or what culture he boasts.

It is a great thing, when our Gethsemane hours come, when the cup of bitterness is pressed to our lips ... to feel that it is not fate, that it is not necessity, but divine love for good ends working upon us.

If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.

There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own.

When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good.