Happiness is not the end of life: character is.

When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.

It is sometimes of God's mercy that men in the eager pursuit of worldly aggrandizement are baffled; for they are very like a train going down an inclined plane - putting on the brake is not pleasant, but it keeps the car on the track.

The world is God's workshop for making men in.

It is a higher exhibition of Christian manliness to be able to bear trouble than to get rid of it.

There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.

Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate.