“Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.

You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…. We are not a nation, so much as a world.

A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.

Only the man who says no is free

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.

The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.

I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.

People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

If heaven exists, to know that there’s laughs, that would be a great thing.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings.