You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.

When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.