Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

Democracy will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from delusive to real, and make a new blessed world of us by and by.

There needs not a great soul to make a hero; there needs a god-created soul which will be true to its origin; that will be a great soul!

One seems to believe almost all that they believe; and when they stop short and call it a Religion, and you pass on, and call it only a reminiscence of one, should you not part with the kiss of peace?

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.