The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

In the huge mass of evil as it rolls and swells, there is ever some good working toward deliverance and triumph.

If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers,-and among many counsellors there is wisdom,-you will bitterly repent when it is too late.