Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life,--do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.

The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and so true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion.

Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesuswould absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defendant.