There are some sins which are more justly to be denominated surprises than infidelities. To such the world should be lenient, as, doubtless, Heaven is forgiving.

To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak.

God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls.

We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only along and painful sickness.

Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice.

Every effort is made in forming matrimonial alliances to reconcile matters relating to fortune, but very little is paid to the congeniality of dispositions, or to the accordance of hearts.

Time is short, your obligations are infinite. Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?

Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.

Whatever passes away is too vile to be the price of time, which is itself the price of eternity.

Nothing is more detestable than a professed declaimer who retails his discourses as a quack does his medicines.

Every Christian is born great because he is born for heaven.

A sharp stick is better than a blunt sword.

A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.

Our vision is beclouded and the pathway of our progress is obstructed until we come to know that god can and does express as Good in every person and every situation.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

I have very girly hands and I use them a lot when I talk in a way that I think is very feminine.

Anything that works well or has long-term success is never done quickly.

We are at best but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of liberality to content it.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.