The miserable have no other medicine, But only hope.

A gift blinds the wise and perverts the words of the righteous.

Some people grow under responsibility, others merely swell.

Taxes are the sinews of the state.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start my friend, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end.

The march of the human mind is slow.

The public is a ferocious beast: one must either chain it up or flee from it.

Consideration, like an angel, came And whipped the offending Adam out of him. -King Henry V. Act i. Sc. 1.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of 30.

Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you can't spend it.

The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead. . . . . The flames roll'd on--he would not go Without his Father's word; That father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard.

Commemoration of Gilbert of Sempringham, Founder of the Gilbertine Order, 1189 I am quite prepared to promise the secularists secular education if they on their side will promise not to have moral instruction. Secular education seems to me intellectually clean and comprehensible. Moral instruction seems to me unclean, intolerable; I would destroy it with fire. Teaching the Old Testament by itself means teaching ancient Hebrew ethics, which are simple, barbaric rudimentary, and, to a Christian, unsatisfying. Teaching moral instruction means teaching modern London, Birmingham and Boston ethics, which are not barbaric and rudimentary, but are corrupt, hysterical and crawling with worms, and which are to a Christian, not unsatisfying but detestable. The old Jew who says that you must fight only for your tribe is inadequate; but the modern prig who says you must never fight for anything is substantially and specifically immoral. I know quite well, of course, that the unreligious ethics suggested for modern schools do not verbally assert these things; they only talk about peaceful reform, true Christianity, and the importance of Count Tolstoy. It is all a matter of tone and implication--but then, so is all teaching. Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume that really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.

A crowd of fellow-sufferers is a miserable kind of comfort.

When the lessons and tasks are all ended, And the school for the day is dismissed, The little one gather around me, To bid me good-night and be kissed; On, the little white arms that encircle My neck in their tender embrace Oh, the smiles that are halos of heaven, Shedding sunshine of love on my face.