No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God.

September] 27th [1862] I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will, and that it might be so, I have sought His aid; but if, after endeavoring to do my best in the light which He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.

And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in GOD, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.

Keep your place in life and your place will keep you

Try before you trust.

Trust not your security to one who puts his own interests first.

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.

We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK.

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

How did we ever get to believe that faithfulness involved simply retaining past forms and thinking? With the Creator God as our Father, how did we ever become the socially conservative stiflers of innovation that we are so notoriously perceived to be?