It would not be more unreasonable to transplant a favorite flower out of black earth into gold dust than it is for a person to let money-getting harden his heart into contempt, or into impatience, of the little attentions, the merriments and the caresses of domestic life.

Let God do with me what He will, anything He will; and, whatever it be, it will be either heaven itself, or some beginning of it.

I do not say the mind gets informed by action, — bodily action; but it does get earnestness and strength by it, and that nameless something that gives a man the mastership of his faculties.

Do we not hear voices, gentle and great, and some of them like the voices of departed friends,— do we not hear them saying to us, Come up hither?

With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.

To understand at all what life means, one must begin with Christian belief. And I think knowledge may be sorrow with a man unless he loves.

Ownership in the world I have none, but I have an infinite interest in it; for if not my own it is my God's; and so it is mine in a higher than a legal sense. Yes, this is the beauty, this is the whole sublimity, this is the tender delight of life - that it is of God's governing.