Our business is not to solve problems beyond our mortal powers, but to see to it that our thoughts are not unworthy of the great theme.

Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.

To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.

Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found.

If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.

There is more than a morsel of truth in the saying, "He who hates vice hates mankind."

Our desires attract supporting reasons as a magnet the iron fillings.

The Holy Spirit testifies the Truth.

To be moral, an act must be free.

Books are Lighthouses erected in the sea of time." Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

I made these Sierra trips, carrying only a sackful of bread with a little tea and sugar, and was thus independent and free.

A friend of ours, who is an admirer of Isaac Walton, was struck, just as we were, with the likeness of the old angler's face to a fish.

If you've got $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, you're better off paying off any debt you have because that's a guaranteed return.

We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.

Grant people a lifetime of forgiveness before you even meet them.

Let Southern oppressors tremble-let their secret abettors tremble-let their Northern apologists tremble-let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.