Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding

The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.

The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces, which expose the whole movement.