Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

God will fight your battles if you just keep still. He is able to carry you through. Trust Him. Keep standing, keep believing and keep hoping.

I have found that the most significant experiences of our lives rarely come when we're expecting them and oftentimes when we're not even paying attention.

Calm of mind, all passion spent.

Virtue could see to do what virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, where, with her best nurse contemplation, she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, sober steadfast, and demure, all in a robe of darkest grain, flowing with majestic train.

Solitude sometimes is best society.

God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving thing. Anyone else who exalts himself distracts us from what we need, namely, God.

Mental health is, in great measure, the gift of self-forgetfulness. The reason is that introspection destroys what matters most to us- the authentic experience of great things outside ourselves.

If you endeavor to bring a holy hush upon your people in a worship service, you can be assured that someone will say that the atmosphere is unfriendly or cold. All that many people can imagine is that the absence of chatter would mean the presence of stiffness and awkwardness and unfriendliness. Since they have little or no experience of the deep gladness of momentous moments of gravity, they strive for gladness the only way they know how—by being lighthearted and chipper and talkative.

We weren't meant to be somebody--we were meant to know Somebody

And I am the rather induced to do what little I can in this way, because I can do nothing else: being prevented, by my present weakness, from either travelling or preaching. But, blessed be God, I can still read, and write, and think. O that it may be to his glory!