It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.

Life is before you,- not earthly life alone, but life- a thread running interminably through the warp of eternity.

How long must the church live before it will learn that strength is won by action, and success by work, and that all this immeasurable feeding without action and work is a positive damage to it--that it is the procurer of spiritual obesity, gout, and debility.

A nation is a thing that lives and acts like a man and men are the particles of which it is composed.

The idle man stands outside of God's plan, outside of the ordained scheme of things; and the truest self-respect, the noblest independence, and the most genuine dignity, are not to be found there.

There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words.

Fashion is not public opinion, or the result of embodiment of public opinion. It may be that public opinion will condemn the shape of a bonnet, as it may venture to do always, and with the certainty of being right nine times in ten: but fashion will place it upon the head of every woman in America; and, were it literally a crown of thorns, she would smile contentedly beneath the imposition.