The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.

Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.

The brightest crowns that are worn in heaven have been tried, and smelted, and polished, and glorified through the furnace of tribulation.

Even yet Christ Jesus has to lie out in waste places very often, because there is no room for him in the inn--no room for him in our hearts, because of our worldliness. There is no room for him even in our politics and religion. There is no room in the inn, and we put him in the manger, and he lies outside our faith, coldly and dimly conceived by us.

If the poor man's earthly lot is hard, it makes more welcome the suggestions of heaven.

In proportion to the difficulty of the endeavor is the glory of the achievement.

Temptation cannot exist without the concurrence of inclination and opportunity.

Belief in God does not rest upon a mere doctrine of logic, which some other statement of logic may come and upset. It is one of those primal facts in the human soul which no mere logic has established nor can refute.

Each age holds the contents of all other ages.

All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.

A transcendent faith, a cheerful trust turns the darkness into a pillar of fire, and the cloud by day into a perpetual glory. They who thus march on are refreshed even in the wilderness, and hear streams of gladness trickling among the rocks.

Like the gush of the morning light, truth must go forward.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.

It is not the man that gives me most of outward things that helps me to live; but the man who gives me thoughts and ideas by which a wider sweep of beauty opens to my vision, and kindles in my holy affections, by which I rise nearer to God.

The stars that roll in glory far above us, and that have stood out so long upon the firmament, like figures on the dial of eternity, shall fade and disappear. But we, who tremble at their greatness and thirst for their secrets, shall pass and live beyond them. Time has no mortgage on the human soul.

All that affliction of the darkest kind ever can work to the true soul is to awaken it up to spiritual things, to open the clear eye, to make the spiritual reality the more real. If you rightly comprehend it it only strikes that which is round about you, it only removes that which is outward and physical, but it leaves you all the same a greater and a better man for your trial.

Religion sows within us the seeds of an undying joy that fails not when outward means of happiness fail, and sorrows darken, and cares appall. It sheds abroad a holy serenity in the heart, and imparts a calm lustre to the brow.... It reveals new sorces of happiness. It makes the spire of grass and the star beautiful ministers of delight.

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime and sorrow triumphant.

The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the "good old times,"--he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.

Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars--not so sparkling and vivid as many, but dispensing a calm radiance that hallows the whole. It is the bow that rests upon the bosom of the cloud when the storm has passed. It is the light that hovers above the judgment-seat.

The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction.

The student of nature is like one who goes with a candle into some immense cavern. Presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct. He thinks he is near the end, when, lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path opens into an immense void, new shapes of mystery start out, and he learns this much that he did not know before, that instead of being near the end he is only upon the threshold.

Munificent nature follows the methods of the divine and true, and rounds all things to her perfect law. While nations are convulsed with blood and violence, how quietly the grass grows.

Poetry is the utterance of truth--deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

We can imagine a world in which there is no work. A world bathed in incessant summer, whose seed-times and harvests are ever mingling, whose springing influences perpetually ascend, whose fruitage perpetually ripens through all the procession of its golden year. A world in which man would never feel the sting of want, And where the felicities of being would unfold without his effort. But we cannot conceive any such world, connected with human peculiarities and necessities, one half, one tithe so glorious as our old world of struggle and of labor. For wherever God has admitted man's agency the noblest results, the achievements of real worth and splendor are the fruits of patient and sinewy toil.