It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.

Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.

The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.

Ordinarily rivers run small at the beginning, grow broader and broader as they proceed, and become widest and deepest at the point, where they enter the sea. It is such rivers that the Christian's life is like. But the life of the mere worldly man is like those rivers in Southern Africa, which, proceeding from mountain freshets, are broad and deep at the beginning, and grow narrower and more shallow as they advance. They waster themselves by soaking into the sands, and at last they die out entirely. The farther they run the less there is of them.

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.

Religion, in one sense, is a life of self-denial, just as husbandry, in one sense, is a work of death.