Masonry superadds to our other obligations the strongest ties of connection between it and the cultivation of virtue, and furnishes the most powerful incentives to goodness.

The real question, after all, is not the quantity of life, but its quality, its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its fineness of spirit and gesture of soul.

Each lodge is an oasis if equality and good will in a desert of strife, working to wield mankind into a great league of sympathy and services, which, by the terms of our definition, it seeks to exhibit now on a small scale.

So many of us know what we are against, but not what we are for-what we disbelieve, not what we believe. A negative life easily becomes neutral and futile.

Masonry is too great an institution to have been made in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of its own cathedrals which one generation of builders wrought and vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of Freedom and Fraternity.

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we can take it, what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end.

Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.