There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.

Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

The essential tendency of life is toward happiness . . . . Optimism is the only true condition for a reasonable man.

We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.

The glory of the star, the glory of the sun - we must not lose either in the other. We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth; we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven.