Wherever you have seen God pass, mark that spot, and go and sit in that window again.

Hope is sweet-minded and sweet-eyed. It draws pictures; it weaves fancies; it fills the future with delight.

A man's soul ought to be as the heavens were on the night when the shepherds looked up, and saw them full of angels as well as stars.

Too much looking backward ... is bad for progress.

Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.

When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum.

There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.

Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the senses.

The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.

Christians ought not to slander God by looking as if they were at an everlasting funeral.

A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted--the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.

Christians should be like a flower store: the odor of sanctity should betray them wherever they are.

Faith is the realization of an invisible truth.

Of all battles, there are none like the unrecorded battles of the soul.

Man's faults lie like reptiles--like toads, like lizards, like serpents; and what if there is over them the evening sky, lit with glory, and all aglow? Are they less reptiles and toads because all is roseate around about them?

Grace is only nature blossomed out; nature won and warmed into its true growth.

Joy is more divine than sorrow; for joy is bread, and sorrow is medicine.

That man is a Christian whose soul has learned to love; and he who has not learned to love, does not know the alphabet of Christianity.

Christians are like vases, they must pass through the fire ere they can shine. The graces which are to be their everlasting beauty and glory must be burned in.

The fugitive, brief, though intense satisfactions that come to the nerves through the appetite and passions are not the foundations of joy in this world: they come with a moment's flash, and are disastrous in their flight.

How many there are that spend their lives in the midst of all the pleasing trifles of that vast museum of curiosities which are labeled religious, and think themselves Christians!

Unfruitful emotion is to be suspected. Feeling acts as an impulse, as a spur, as a spring, and when feelings are excited, and they put nothing forward, they are sometimes even dangerous to a man.

There is no harder shield for the devil to pierce with temptation than singing with prayer.

When we have heartily repented of a wrong, we should let all the waves of forgetfulness roll over it, and go forward unburdened to meet the future.

Righteousness is as hereditary as vice, and godly men transmit moral qualities to their children, and to their children's children.

God puts the excess of hope in one man, in order that it may be a medicine to the man who is despondent.

If one could wallow amid filth for half a life and then wash himself clean in a day, then sin would be no worse than dirt on the hands which water can cleanse in a minute. Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

It is only God who can satisfy the soul.

No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.

A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will overcome it.

Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.

The greatest architect and the one most needed is Hope.

Adversity is the mint in which God stamps upon man his image and superscription.