What ascends up in prayer descends to us again in blessings. It is like the rain which just now fell, and which had been drawn up from the ground in vapors to the clouds before it descended from them to the earth in that refreshing shower.

People talk as if the act of death made a complete change in the nature, as well as in the condition of man. Death is the vehicle to another state of being, but possesses no power to qualify us for that state. In conveying us to a new world it does not give us a new heart.

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

Did not God Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask, We should be ruined at our own request.

It is the large aggregate of small things perpetually occurring that robs me of all my time. The expense of learning to read might have been spared in my education, for I never read.

the modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.

parents are too apt to mistake inclination for genius.