An empire is an immense egotism.

[He said] that it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times; that we are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer. That his view of prayer was nothing else but a sense of the Presence of God, his soul being at that time insensible to everything but Divine Love; and that when the appointed times of prayer were past, he found no difference, because he still continued with God, praising and blessing Him with all his might, so that he passed his life in continual joy; yet hoped that God would give him somewhat to suffer when he should have grown stronger.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

Passion doesn't look beyond the moment of its existence.

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

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Whatever is popular deserves attention.

A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.

Men say, "How are we to act, what are we to teach our children, now that we are no longer Christians?" You see, gentlemen, how I would answer that question. You are deceived in thinking that the morality of your father was based on Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity presupposed it. That morality stands exactly where it did; its basis has not been withdrawn, for, in a sense, it never had a basis. The ultimate ethical injunctions have always been premises, never conclusions. Kant was perfectly right on that point at least, the imperative is categorical. Unless the ethical is assumed from the outset, no argument will bring you to it.

The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.

You can't aim a duck to death.

There shall be no more snow No weary noontide heat, So we lift our trusting eyes From the hills our Fathers trod: To the quiet of the skies: To the Sabbath of our God.

But thus: if powers divine Behold our human actions, as they do, I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush and tyranny Tremble at patience.

Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong.

Somebody once figured out that we have 35 million laws trying to enforce 10 commandments.

Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?

Commemoration of Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, Bishop of York, Missionary, 709 Commemoration of Elizabeth Fry, Prison Reformer, 1845 While many Americans are still firmly committed to the traditional, supernatural conceptions of a personal God, a Divine Savior, and the promise of eternal life, the trend is away from these convictions. The fact is that a demythologized modernism is overwhelming the traditional Christ-centered, mystical faith. For the modern skeptics are not the apostates, village atheists, or political revolutionaries of old. The leaders of today's challenge to traditional beliefs are principally theologians -- those in whose care the church entrusts its sacred teachings.

A small debt produces a debtor; a large one, an enemy.

With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.