The present is only intelligible in the light of the past.

Prayer is not getting man's will done in heaven, but getting God's will done on earth. It is not overcoming God's reluctance but laying hold of God's willingness.

Language is the close-fitting dress of thought.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Best friends might loathe us, if what things perverse we know of our own selves they also knew.

As shadows attend substances, so words follow upon things.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.

Sin may be clasped so close, we cannot see its face.

We kneel, how weak we rise, how full of power! Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this wrong, Or others — that we are not always strong, That we are ever overborne with care, That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, And joy and strength and courage are with Thee?

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

If we with earnest effort could succeed To make our life one long, connected prayer, As lives of some, perhaps, have been and are If, never leaving Thee, we have no need Our wandering spirits back again to lead Into Thy presence, but continued there Like angels standing on the highest stair Of the Sapphire Throne: this were to pray indeed!

There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it.

We live not in our moments or our years: The present we fling from us like the rind Of some sweet future, which we after find Bitter to taste.

Speak but little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit.

All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake, Because in us keen longings they awake.