There is no kind obondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength; and nothing reveals a man's character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.

The test of friendship is its fidelity when every charm of fortune and environment has been spent away, and the bare, undraped character alone remains; if love still holds steadfast, and the joy of companionship survives in such an hour, the fellowship becomes a beautiful prophecy of immortality.

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

Man is incomprehensible without Nature and Nature is incomprehensible apart from man. For the delicate loveliness of the flower is as much in the human eye as in its own fragile petals and in the splendor of the heavens as much in the imagination that kindles at the touch of their glory as in the shining of countless worlds.

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with, the wind.

Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary.

The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.