Mistakes are often the best teachers.

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.

Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; [but] a creed is always sensitive.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.