“Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.”

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

A woman’s love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

Something of a person’s character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and–prayer.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.

An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

It is important to receive God’s arrangement in the circumstances. This arrangement is the discipline of the Holy Spirit. To escape God’s arrangement just one time is to lose an opportunity to have our capacity enlarged. A believer can never be the same after passing through suffering.

For, the circumference of one of these little Animals in water, is not so big as the thickness of a hair in a Cheese-mite.

The whole circumference of each of these streaks was about the thickness of a hair of one’s head. … all consisted of very small green globules joined together: and there were very many small green globules as well. [The earliest recorded observation of the common green alga Spyrogyra.]

But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.