Man cannot choose his duties.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.