Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind.
Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth.
The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.
Part of the down-to-earthness that made the pioneers succeed was expressed in a sentence: It takes pretty good [people] to get along with water ditches in a dry time, and not quarrel.
Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul.
Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.
We must seek the loving-kindness of God in all the breadth and open-air of common life.
We breathe the free air, we have the best looking men and handsomest women, and if they envy our position, well they may, for they are a poor, narrow minded, pinch-backed race of man, who chain themselves down to the law of monogamy and live all their days under the dominion of one wife. They aught to be ashamed of such conduct, and the still fouler channel which flows from their practices.
How on the face of the earth could a man enjoy his religion, when he had been told by the Lord how to prepare for a day of famine, when, instead of doing so, he had fooled away that which would have sustained him and his family.
Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up.
If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to believe that God Himself should guard it.
Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself.
The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.
There is no truth which the prophets press more steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight and on the care of God.
Man does find in Nature deliverance from himself, oblivion of his past, with peace and purity!
Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards God from what he finds best in himself.
