Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? -King Henry VI. Part II. Act iv. Sc. 2.

The Revelation of God is not a book or a doctrine, but a living Person.

At this point therefore let us begin our narrative, without adding any more to what has already been said; for it would be foolish to lengthen the preface while cutting short the history itself.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

How he sleepeth! having drunken Weary childhood's mandragore, From his pretty eyes have sunken Pleasures to make room for more-- Sleeping near the withered nosegay which he pulled the day before.

Commemoration of Frederick Denison Maurice, Priest, teacher, 1872 God has brought us into this time; He, and not ourselves or some dark demon. If we are not fit to cope with that which He has prepared for us, we would have been utterly unfit for any condition that we imagine for ourselves. We are to live and wrestle in this time, and in no other. Let us humbly, tremblingly, manfully look at it, and we shall not wish that the sun could go back its ten degrees, or that we could go back with it. If easy times are departed, it is that the difficult times may make us more in earnest; that they may teach us not to depend on ourselves. If easy belief is impossible, it is that we may learn what belief is, and in whom it is to be placed.

Feast of Martin, Monk, Bishop of Tours, 397 Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship -- and not as ends in themselves.

Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.

Continuing a short series on forgiveness: With this sweet hope of ultimate acceptance with God, I have always enjoyed much cheerfulness before men; but I have at the same time laboured incessantly to cultivate the deepest humiliation before God. I have never thought that the circumstance of God's having forgiven me was any reason why I should forgive myself; on the contrary, I have always judged it better to loathe myself the more, in proportion as I was assured that God was pacified towards me (Ezekiel 16:63).

Ninety percent of the things we tend to worry about we have no control over, so why worry about them?

A nation, like a person, has a mind--a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and needs of its neighbors--all the other nations that live within the narrowing circle of the world.

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

The Churches belong together in the Church. What that may mean for our ecclesiastical groupings we do not know. We have not discovered the kind or outward manifestation which God wills that we shall give to that inner unity. But we must seek it.

The kings of modern thought are dumb.

Always leave loved ones with loving words, it may be the last time you see them.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Thy clothes are all the soul thou hast.