Every noble work is at first impossible.

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.

Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!

The crash of the whole solar and stellar systems could only kill you once.

It is great, and there is no other greatness-to make one nook of God's Creation more fruitful, better, more worthy of God; to make some human heart a little wiser, manlier, happier-more blessed.

Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries, are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this His universe to go.

All comes out even at the end of the day.

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you. The second duty will then become clearer.

There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it.

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man.

The true epic of our times is not Arm's and the Man, but Tools and the Man -- an infinitely wider kind of epic.