No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.

My vocation to preach on paper.

the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide'll turn.

I b'lieve in religion, and one of these days, when I've got matters tight and snug, I calculates to tend to my soul.

Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.