The child's grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man's sorrow, and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.
The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.
An aged Christian, with the snow of time upon his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest to heaven.
Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.
The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.
Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the Throne.
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.
Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disk of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.
Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.
Home is the seminary of all other institutions.
Conscience is its own readiest accuser.
It is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill.
The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the "good old times,"--he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.
Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.
Why, man of idleness, labor has rocked you in the cradle, and nourished your pampered life; without it, the woven silk and the wool upon your bank would be in the shepherd's fold. For the meanest thing that ministers to human want, save the air of heaven, man is indebted to toil; and even the air, in God's wise ordination, is breathed with labor.
The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it.
We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.
It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.
No piled-up wealth, no social station, no throne, reaches as high as that spiritual plane upon which every human being stands by virtue of his humanity.
Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.
Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?
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