As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.

A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.

It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

The unmerciful man is most certainly an unblessed man. His sympathies are all dried up; he is afflicted with a chronic jaundice, and lives timidly and darkly in a little, narrow rat-hole of distrust.

There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.

In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.

No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.