It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.

Not without design does God write the music of our lives.

That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.