Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!

Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.

There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad heart.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.