... moral evil is its own curse.

The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system,--a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include all the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities,--an indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.

Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of - and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system.... The heart must have something to cling to.

If it be the characteristic of a worldly man that he desecrates what is holy, it should be of the Christian to consecrate what is secular, and to recognize a present and presiding divinity in all things.

Faith is like the hand of the beggar that takes the gift while adding nothing to it.

With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.

There are no moral blanks; there are no neutral characters.