Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.

The universal subjugator, the commonplace.

Sometimes it's useful to know how large your zero is.

Yet will she blush, here be it said, To bear her secrets so bewrayed.

The fellow who is fired with enthusiasm for his work is seldom fired by his boss.

That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience.

The man who is just and resolute will not be moved from his settled purpose, either by the misdirected rage of his fellow citizens, or by the threats of an imperious tryant.

Faith is not contrary to reason….

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

Thou wear a lion's hide! doff it for shame, And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs. -King John. Act iii. Sc. 1.

Beginning a Lenten series on prayer: If we would talk less and pray more about them, things would be better than they are in the world: at least, we should be better enabled to bear them.

Feast of Basil the Great & Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops, Teachers, 379 & 389 Commemoration of Seraphim, Monk of Sarov, Mystic, Staretz, 1833 I have seen minute-glasses: glasses so short liv'd! If I were to preach upon this text ("For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matt. 6:21), to such a glass, it would be enough for half the sermon, enough to show the worldly man his treasure, and the object of his Heart, to call his eye to that minute-glass, and to tell him, "There flows, there flies, your treasure, and your heart with it." But if I had a secular glass, a glass that would run an age; if the two hemispheres of the world were composed in the form of such a glass, and all the world burnt to ashes, and all the ashes, and the sands, and atoms of the world put into that glass, it would not be enough to tell the godly man what his treasure, and the object of his heart is. A parrot will sooner be brought to relate to us the wisdom of a council table, than any Ambrose, or any Chrysostom, men that have gold and honey in their names, shall tell us what the treasure of heaven is, and that man's peace, that hath set his Heart upon that treasure.

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

Into God's hands let us now -- for the coming year, and for all the years of time, and for Eternity -- commend our spirits. Whether for the Church or for ourselves, let us not take ourselves into our own hands, or choose our own lot. "My times are in Thy hand." He loveth the Church, which He died to purchase, His own Body, and all the members of the Body, better than we can; He loveth us better and more wisely than we ourselves He who made us loveth us better than we who unmade ourselves; He who died for us, better than we who destroy ourselves: He who would sanctify us for a Holy Temple unto Himself, better than we who have defiled what He has hallowed. Fear we not, therefore, anything which threateneth, shrink we not back from anything which falleth on us. Rather let us, though with trembling, hold up our hearts to Him, to make them His Own, in what way He willeth.

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.

For some extraordinary reason, the Church moves in an atmosphere of antiquity. I have no doubt that it makes for dignity; I have also no coubt that there are times when it makes for complete irrelevance; for, if there is one thing that is true of religion it is that it must always be expressible in contemporary terms. Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

It is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart! -John Bunyan.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.