Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us, and degrades our household life, we must adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.

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.