As a coal is revived by incense, so prayer revives the hopes of the heart.
From a strict point of view we must have a reformation of ourselves every day, and protest against others, even though it be in no religious sense.
It should be our earnest endeavor to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine and reason. It is an endeavor which we cannot evade, and which is daily to be renewed.
Let every man examine himself, and he will find this a much harder task than he might suppose; for, unhappily, a man usually takes words as mere make-shifts; his knowledge and his thought are in most cases better than his method of expression.
False, irrelevant, and futile ideas may arise in ourselves and others, or find their way into us from without. Let us persist in the effort to remove them as far as we can, by plain and honest purpose.
Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.
A man is not deceived by others; he deceives himself.
Laws are all made by old people and by men. Youths and women want the exceptions, old people the rules.
Chinese, Indian and Egyptian antiquities are never more than curiosities; it is well to make acquaintance with them; but in point of moral and æsthetic culture they can help us little.
The German runs no greater danger than to advance with and by the example of his neighbors. There is perhaps no nation that is fitter for the process of self-development; so that it has proved of the greatest advantage to Germany to have obtained the notice of the world so late.