Part of the down-to-earthness that made the pioneers succeed was expressed in a sentence: It takes pretty good [people] to get along with water ditches in a dry time, and not quarrel.

Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind.

Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.

We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and open-air of common life.

Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul.

We breathe the free air, we have the best looking men and handsomest women, and if they envy our position, well they may, for they are a poor, narrow minded, pinch-backed race of man, who chain themselves down to the law of monogamy and live all their days under the dominion of one wife. They aught to be ashamed of such conduct, and the still fouler channel which flows from their practices.

There is no truth which the prophets press more steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight and on the care of God.