Thoughts

Portada
Wm. Crosby & H.P. Nichols, 1846 - 160 páginas
 

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 9 - God be thanked for books ! They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.
Página 43 - What ! in the beauty of childhood and youth, in that open brow, that cheerful smile, do you see the brand of total corruption ? Is it a little fiend who sleeps so sweetly on his mother's breast ? Was it an infant demon, which Jesus took in his arms and said, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven...
Página 10 - Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.
Página 82 - ... and love, are of more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which give celebrity to a few. Let us not disparage that nature which is common to all men ; for no thought can measure its grandeur. It is the image of God, the image even of his infinity, for no limits can be set to its unfolding. He who possesses the divine powers of the soul is a great being, be his place what it may.
Página 139 - I see the marks of God in the heavens and the earth ; but how much more in a liberal intellect, in magnanimity, in unconquerable rectitude, in a philanthropy which forgives every wrong, and which never despairs of the cause of Christ and human virtue. I do and I must reverence human nature. Neither the sneers of a worldly scepticism, nor the groans of a gloomy theology, disturb my faith in its godlike powers and tendencies.
Página 153 - ... what hearts have bled; what millions have been butchered by their fellow-creatures; what hopes of philanthropy have been blighted ! And at the same time what magnificent enterprises have been achieved ; what new provinces won to science and art; what rights and liberties secured to nations! It is a privilege to have lived in an age so stirring, so pregnant, so eventful. It is an age never to be forgotten.
Página 16 - Christians than that of man's immortality; but it is not so generally underStood, that the germs or principles of his whole future being are now wrapped up in his soul, as the rudiments of the future plant in the seed. As a necessary result of this constitution, the soul, possessed and moved by these mighty though infant energies, is perpetually stretching beyond what is present and visible, struggling against the bounds of its earthly prisonhouse, and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen...
Página 81 - ... enrolled itself in this or another sect ? A pure mind is free of the universe. It belongs to the church, the family of the pure, in all worlds. Virtue is no local thing. It is not honorable because born in this community or that, but for its own independent, everlasting beauty. This is the bond of the universal church. No man can be excommunicated from it but by himself, by the death of goodness in his own breast.
Página 67 - ... common light which the sun sends into all our windows, which he pours freely, impartially over hill and valley, which kindles daily the eastern and western sky ; and so the common lights of reason, and conscience, and love, are of more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which give celebrity to a few.
Página 120 - Judging from character, I should say that this name belongs much more to the North, the country of steady, persevering, unconquerable energy. Our Southern brethren remind me more of the Normans. They seem to have in their veins the burning blood of that pirate race...

Información bibliográfica