The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.

In the smithy the iron is softened by blowing up the fire, and taking the dross from the bar.  As soon as it is purified, it is beaten and pressed, and becomes firm again by the addition of fresh water.  The same thing happens to a man at the hands of his teacher.

What belongs to a man he cannot get rid of, even though he throws it away.

Of true religions there are only two:  one of them recognizes and worships the Holy that, without form or shape, dwells in and around us; and the other recognizes and worships it in its fairest form.  Everything that lies between these two is idolatry.

The Saints were all at once driven from heaven; and senses, thought and heart were turned from a divine mother with a tender child, to the grown man doing good and suffering evil, who was later transfigured into a being half-divine in its nature, and then recognized and honored as God himself.  He stood against a background where the Creator had opened out the universe; a spiritual influence went out from him; his sufferings were adopted as an example, and his transfiguration was the pledge of ever-lastingness.

As a coal is revived by incense, so prayer revives the hopes of the heart.

From a strict point of view we must have a reformation of ourselves every day, and protest against others, even though it be in no religious sense.

It should be our earnest endeavor to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine and reason.  It is an endeavor which we cannot evade, and which is daily to be renewed.

Let every man examine himself, and he will find this a much harder task than he might suppose; for, unhappily, a man usually takes words as mere make-shifts; his knowledge and his thought are in most cases better than his method of expression.

False, irrelevant, and futile ideas may arise in ourselves and others, or find their way into us from without.  Let us persist in the effort to remove them as far as we can, by plain and honest purpose.

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

A man is not deceived by others; he deceives himself.

Laws are all made by old people and by men.  Youths and women want the exceptions, old people the rules.

Chinese, Indian and Egyptian antiquities are never more than curiosities; it is well to make acquaintance with them; but in point of moral and aesthetic culture they can help us little.

The German runs no greater danger than to advance with and by the example of his neighbors.  There is perhaps no nation that is fitter for the process of self-development; so that it has proved of the greatest advantage to Germany to have obtained the notice of the world so late.

The greatest difficulties lie where we do not look for them.