Running into debt isn't so bad. It's running into creditors that hurts.

The law of England is the greatest grievance of the nation, very expensive and dilatory.

You meet a thousand times in life with those who, in dealing with any religious question, make at once their appeal to reason, and insist on forthwith rejecting aught that lies beyond its sphere -- without, however, being able to render any clear account of the nature and proper limits of the knowledge thus derived, or of the relation in which such knowledge stands to the religious needs of men. I would invite you, therefore, to inquire seriously whether such persons are not really bowing down before an idol of the mind, which, while itself of very questionable worth, demands as much implicit faith from its worshipers as divine revelation itself.

Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.

. . . by evil report and good report . . .

The burden of the desert of the sea. As whirlwinds in the south pass through; so it cometh from the desert, from a terrible land.

Listening is an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals. -J. Isham.

As if thou e'er wert angry But with thy tailor! and yet that poor shred Can bring more to the making up of a man, Than can be hoped from thee; thou art his creature; And did he not, each morning, new create thee, Thou'dst stink and be forgotten.

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant, but we can't dodge a fly.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Compassion is the only one of the human emotions the Lord permitted Himself and it has carried the divine flavor ever since.

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

To illustrate the difference between the innovator and the dull crowd of routinists who cannot even imagine that any improvement is possible, we need only refer to a passage in Engel's most famous book. Here, in 1878, Engels apodictically announced that military weapons are "now so perfected that no further progress of any revolutionizing influence is any longer possible." Henceforth "all further progress is by and large indifferent for land warfare. The age of evolution is in this regard essentially closed." This complacent conclusion shows in what the achievement of the innovator consists: he accomplishes what other people believe to be unthinkable and unfeasible.

More than any other religion or, indeed, than any other element in human experience, Christianity has made for the intellectual advance of man in reducing languages to writing, creating literatures, promoting education from primary grades through institutions of university level, and stimulating the human mind and spirit to fresh explorations into the unknown. It has been the largest single factor in combating, on a world-wide scale, such ancient foes of man as war, famine, and the exploitation of one race by another. More than any other religion, it has made for the dignity of human personality. This it has done by a power inherent within it of lifting lives from selfishness, spiritual mediocrity, and moral defeat and disintegration, to unselfish achievement and contagious moral and spiritual power and by the high value which it set upon every human soul through the possibilities which it held out of endless growth in fellowship with the eternal God.

The measure of a man is not the number of servants he has, but the number of people he serves.

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.