“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Justice is like the kingdom of God–it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?