Experience is personal, and it is largely incommunicable; but genius—and in this lies its power and charm—renders it communicable. What the poet or the painter has felt and seen, he makes all men feel and see. The difference between man and man, between the child and the youth, the youth and the adult, is chiefly a difference in feeling, in the manner in which they are impressed; and it is our nature to be drawn in admiration or reverence to those who by their words or deeds give us deeper impressions of the worth of life, and thus open for us new sources of feeling.
Fair thoughts rise in the heart and mind of genius, like the fragrant breath which the dewy flowers exhale in the face of the rising sun, and they utter themselves as simply as matin songs warbled by sweet-throated birds.
Faith in the infinite nature and worth of truth, goodness, and love, is the dawn which shall merge into the fulness of day, when, in other worlds, God looks upon the soul, reborn from out this seemingness.
Our position, our reputation, our wealth, our comforts, are but a vesture like the body itself. They shall fall away, and we shall remain with God. There is no liberty but obedience to the impulse of the higher nature which urges us to think nobly, to act rightly, and to love constantly. The dominion of appetite is slavery; the dominion of reason and conscience is freedom.
Renan somewhere says he could wish for nothing better than that a little volume of selections from his writings might commend itself to young women, whose fair faces should bend over it, and find there a reflection of their own pure souls. But where there is no God, the soul is not mirrored, and we never really love an author who weakens faith and hope.
With whatever success we advance towards the wide and serene life of the pure reason, let us still cling to faith, hope, and love, the primal powers which keep watch at our birth, and which bend over our cradles, and which alone lift us into the world of enduring peace and hold us within the sheltering arms of God. In the enlightened mind, faith is a higher virtue than it can be for the ignorant, and to sustain it there is need of a nobler life.
He whom neither learning nor power nor wealth can corrupt must have virtue; for learning breeds conceit, and power begets pride, and wealth debases both the mind and heart.
The intellect does not recognize that conscience may forbid its exercise, since knowledge cannot be evil. If earth were a hell and life a curse and the Universe but a cinder, it would still be good to know the fact. The saddest truth is better than the merriest lie.
To know a thing is to be conscious of its relation to the mind. We know it, not in itself, but in and through this relation. Our knowledge of God, who is the absolute, is not absolute knowledge, but a knowledge of Him in so far as He is related to the mind of man. Since, however, mind is reason and not unreason, there is harmony between it and things, between it and God; and hence to be conscious of its relation to God and the universe is to be conscious of a real relation, in which both the thinker and his thought are in truth what they seem to be. The ultimate reality is inferred, not directly perceived. It reveals itself to the purest faith and love, and may be hidden from one who knows all the sciences.
As man's relations to his fellows make him a social and political being, so his relations to the unseen power behind and within the visible world, of whose presence he is always, however dimly, conscious, and to whom he refers whatever touches the senses, as well as the principle of life itself, make him a religious being.