Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.

The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.