'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True it is that Death's face seems stern and cold When he is sent to summon those we love; But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after another, lift their frowning masks, And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the Glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God.

Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

Ez fer war, I call it murder,- There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that. . . . . . An' you 've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

Granting our wish is one of Fate's saddest jokes.

Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.