Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.

Once in an age God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false-imagining, an unreal character, but looking through the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,--loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be.

Midnight,--strange mystic hour,--when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.

the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.

The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity.

It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least.

Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature--and only that.