O thrush, your song is passing sweet, But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.

Commemoration of John & Henry Venn, Priests, Evangelical Divines, 1813, 1873 When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed -- the loss of some little article, say -- spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and is not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower; and fret over the missing volume, ... is it not time that I lost a few things, when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth? I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man until that thought be recovered -- to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook into which I shall never look again to find it! I forget that it is live things that God cares about.

Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh, give me back my heart!

The Lord has turned all our sunsets into sunrise.

I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.

Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.

The amount of power freed by telling yourself you no longer choose to put energy into something can be remarkable. Be prepared for extra energy.

Man learns more readily and remembers more willingly what excites his ridicule than what deserves esteem and respect.

Success comes in cans, not can't s.

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, If with his tongue he cannot win a woman. -The Two Gentleman of Verona. Act iii. Sc. 1.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone; one should keep his friendships in constant repair.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.

Again let us dream where the land lies sunny And live, like the bees, on our hearts' old honey, Away from the world that slaves for money-- Come, journey the way with me.

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.

I 'll tickle your catastrophe. -King Henry IV. Part II. Act ii. Sc. 1.

Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.

But yet she listen'd--'tis enough-- Who listens once will listen twice; Her heart, be sure, is not of ice, And one refusal no rebuff.