Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly, before all the World, in some mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem.
The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with pleasure. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys... The amiable dreamer of Nazareth has only contributed to increasing the hatred... What superstition and fanaticism on every side!
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency.
Lying very still and thinking very little is the most inexpensive medicine for all the sicknesses of the soul, and when administered with good intentions it grows more and more pleasant with each passing hour.
Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side.
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp; i' faith, you are too angry. Katherine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting. Petruchio: My remedy is then, to pluck it out. Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies. Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail. Katherine: In his tongue. Petruchio: Whose tongue? Katherine: Yours, if you talk of tails: and so farewell. Petruchio: What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again, Good Kate; I am a gentleman.
No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.