I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.

... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.