The beginnings of moral enterprises in this world are never to be measured by any apparent growth. ... At length comes the sudden ripeness and the full success, and he who is called in at the final moment deems this success his own. He is but the reaper and not the labourer. Other men sowed and tilled and he but enters into their labours.

The superfluous blossoms on a fruit tree are meant to symbolize the large way God loves to do pleasant things.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

“I can forgive, but I cannot forget,” is only another way of saying, “I will not forgive.”

It takes longer for man to find out man than any other creature that is made.

A good digestion is as truly obligatory as a good conscience; pure blood is as truly a part of mankind as a pure faith; and a well ordered skin is the first condition of that cleanliness which is next to Godliness.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.