Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.

I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.