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

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.

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.

Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity!

The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.

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.