Christianity only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. The mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. Our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. Her experience has been too much for her. The lesson of life was too hard for her to learn.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

Probe the universe in a myriad of points. ... He is a wise man who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad of objects have each suggesting something, contributed something.

I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.

I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.