I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

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.

Life is to be lived, not controlled.

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved, by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once.