The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.

Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent.

She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.

Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on.

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.

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.

Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence.