Religion is life essential.

I only know when I don't know a thing. My uncle has taught me that wisdom lies in that.

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

I learned that he that will be a hero will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work is sure of his manhood.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.