The only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones.

To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be within and without: . . . with such differences as might suit and express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history.

We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we cannot put our hearts.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.