Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

In every parting there is an image of death.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.