"The work of a true missionary is work indeed, often very monotonous, apparently not very successful, and carried on through great and varied but unceasing difficulties."

"There are three great truths, 1st, That there is a God; 2nd, That He has spoken to us in the Bible; 3rd, That He means what He says. Oh, the joy of trusting Him!"

"There is great danger of not, in happiness, finding our delight in the Lord."

"Those who do not make God Lord of all, do not make Him Lord at all"

"To know and to do His will – this is our safety; this is our rest."

"True devotion will rather ask to be allowed to give, and will count as loss all which may not be given up for the Lord’s sake."

"Wave after wave of trial rolled over us; but at the end of the year some of us were constrained to confess, that we had learned more of the loving-kindness of the Lord than in any previous year of our lives."

"We are taking our four little children, and I never need anyone to remind me that they need their breakfast . . . dinner . . . supper. And I cannot imagine that our heavenly Father is less able or less willing to remember His children’s needs, when He sends them forth to the end of the earth about His business."

"We believe that the time has come for doing more fully what He has commanded us; and by His grace we intend to do it. Not to try, for we see no Scriptural authority for trying. Try is a word constantly in the mouth of unbelievers, . . . far too often taken up by believers. In our experience, ‘to try’ has usually meant ‘to fail’. (The Lord’s) command is not ‘Do your best,’ but ‘DO IT’."

"We have so often been disappointed that we must not be too sure of anything, save of God’s help and presence which He will never withhold."

"We may fail, do fail continually, but He never fails."

"We shall find that Separation to GOD is followed by Blessing from GOD; and that those who receive large blessing from Him, in turn render to Him acceptable Service; service in which GOD takes delight, and which He places in everlasting remembrance."

"We wish to see churches and Christian Chinese presided over by pastors and officers of their own countrymen, worshipping the true God in the land of their fathers, in the costume of their fathers, in their own tongue wherein they were born, and in edifices of a thoroughly Chinese style of architecture."

"What I have to watch against is impatience at waiting His time."

"When the heart submits, then Jesus reigns When Jesus reigns, there is rest."

"When you need it, rest in body; rest always in spirit."

"Where the need is greatest let us be found gladly obeying the MASTER’S command. For it is in the harvest-field, it is among the reapers, that we shall find Him."

"While unbelief sees the difficulties, faith sees God between itself and them."

"With GOD all things are possible, and no conviction ever takes place save by the almighty power of the HOLY GHOST. The great need, therefore, of every Christian worker is to know GOD."

"To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men."

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago...had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands."

"What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command."

"The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness."

"A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest."

"The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought."

"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way."

"Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry."

"The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum."

"Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself."

"The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite."

"The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men."

"All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution."

"The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product."

"One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take."

"The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities...A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship."

"It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution."

"The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women."

"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum."

"Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis."

"There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself."

""Charm"—which means the power to effect work without employing brute force—is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm."

"If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth."

"Every artist writes his own autobiography."

"'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it."

"The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life."