he reveals himself, is the only true bliss on earth.

Kepler said: 'My wish is that I may perceive the God whom I find
everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside
me.' The good man was not aware that, in that very moment, the divine in
him stood in the closest connection with the divine in the Universe.

What is predestination? It is this: God is mightier and wiser than we
are, and so he does with us as he pleases.

Toleration should, strictly speaking, be only a passing mood; it ought
to lead to acknowledgment and appreciation. To tolerate a person is to
affront him.

Faith, Love and Hope once felt, in a quiet sociable hour, a plastic
impulse in their nature; they worked together and created a lovely
image, a Pandora in the higher sense, Patience.

'I stumbled over the roots of the tree which I planted.' It must have
been an old forester who said that.

Does the sparrow know how the stork feels?

Lamps make oil spots, and candles want snuffing; it is only the light of
heaven that shines pure and leaves no stain.

If you miss the first button-hole, you will not succeed in buttoning up
your coat.

A burnt child dreads the fire; an old man who has often been singed is
afraid of warming himself.

It is not worth while to do anything for the world that we have with us,
as the existing order may in a moment pass away. It is for the past and
the future that we must work: for the past, to acknowledge its merits;
for the future, to try to increase its value.

Let no one think that people have waited for him as for the Savior.

Character in matters great and small consists in a man steadily pursuing
the things of which he feels himself capable.

Can a nation become ripe? That is a strange question. I would answer,
Yes! if all the men could be born thirty years of age. But as youth will
always be too forward and old age too backward, the really mature man is
always hemmed in between them, and has to resort to strange devices to
make his way through.

The most important matters of feeling as of reason, of experience as of
reflection, should be treated of only by word of mouth. The spoken word
at once dies if it is not kept alive by some other word following on it
and suited to the hearer. Observe what happens in social converse. If
the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once
by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an
interruption, and all