Great Throughts Treasury

"I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vainglory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue. Nothing is more detestable than a professed declaimer, who retails his discourses as a quack does his medicine."

"Religion would not have enemies, if it were not an enemy to their vices."

"Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice."

"We say unceasingly that the world is nothing, yet we live only for the world."

"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."

"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."

"The source of our sorrows is usually in our errors."

"Time is short; your obligations are infinite."

"I would have none of that rigid circumspect charity which is never done without scrutiny, and which always mistrusts the truth of the necessities laid open to it."

"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."