If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place!

As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that. Let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. It will prove a failure.... It is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. When you get God to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced,--to say nothing of the conscience sawing transversely,--almost any timber will give way.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

There may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated man,--all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners!

Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.

Let nothing come between you and the light.