Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end. |
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. |
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back. |
If you could only know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that 'the time is short,' how it would break the spell. How you would go instantly and do the thing, which you might never have another chance to do! |
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you. |
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. |
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt that his life belongs to his race, and that which God gives to him, He gives him for mankind. |
No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness. |
No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind. |
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children. |
The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is. |
Very stange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present. |
You who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up someday; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them |
You who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him someday |