“But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?”

A small dainty task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

It’s dogged as does it. It ain’t thinking about it.

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.

A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage.

My life is a stairway to heaven, not a ‘decline into decrepitude.

People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values.

They’re trying to pay for health care and send their kids to college, they’re worried about declining home values, they’re scared for a loved one they have serving in Iraq.

Since the decline of record companies and music sales, I’ve always played live.

As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.

The principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance.