“To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.”

“The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work.”

“Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for boredom and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged tomorrow.”

“Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind!My soul in storm is but a tattered sail,Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale;In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing:Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing,To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the windNor rest until in thee its haven it shall find.Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns,Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns,But love is life. To die of love is thenThe only pass to higher life than this.All love is death to loving, living men;All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss.Weakness needs pity, sometimes love's rebuke;Strength only sympathy deserves and draws -And grows by every faithful loving look.Ripeness must always come with loss of might.”

“I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.”

“You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.”

“Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea.”