Starved faculties.
People don’t realize what it is to starve faculties; they understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is what they do not understand.
Idealizing our work.
The chief evil of poverty is the crushing of ideality out of life, taking away its poetry and substituting hard prose;—and this, with them, was impossible. My father loved the work he did as the artist loves his painting, and the sculptor his chisel. A man needs less money when he is doing only what he loves to do—what, in fact, he must do,—pay or no pay.... My mother, from her deep spiritual nature, was one soul with my father in his life-work. With the moral organization of a prophetess she stood nearer to heaven than he, and looking in told him what she saw, and he, holding her hand, felt the thrill of celestial electricity.
True greatness.
“I want you to be a good man. A great many have tried to be great men, and failed, but nobody ever sincerely tried to be a good man and failed.”