This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.

Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?

Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.

Character has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence.

God's beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. O! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God.

Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.

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