“A book should be luminous not voluminous.”

Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity.

To be without sympathy is to be alone in the world–without friends or country, home or kindred.

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great. Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised.

The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it–to realize it to the full–to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.

There will always be romance in the world so long as there are young hearts in it.

Fame – a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,–like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

A great destiny needs a generous diet. What can be expected of a people that live on macaroni!

Dreamers are half-way men of thought, and men of thought are half-way men of action.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

An eager pursuit of fortune is inconsistent with a severe devotion to truth. The heart must grow tranquil before the thought can become searching.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

The reveries of the dreamer advance his hopes, but not their realization. One good hour of earnest work is worth them all.

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.

So I be written in the Book of Love. I do not care about that Book Above. Erase my name, or write it as you will. So I be written in the Book of Love.

We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.

A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.

I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don’t discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that’s very telling.

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.

The church that preaches the gospel in all of its fullness, except as it applies to the great social ills of the day, is failing to preach the gospel.

The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life.

No man understands the Scriptures, unless he be acquainted with the Cross.