Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/396

388 Let us try always to feel that in the commonest things we may hear the command of God, that the trifles of each day—trifles though they be—vibrate and sound with the reverberation of His great voice.

The best things are nearest; light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

For honesty is before honor; and though man must write his poems in sounding words, God's poems are printed best in the brave and silent duties of common life. —.

We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there. —.

There are no trifles in the moral universe of God. Speak me a word to-day;—it shall go ringing on through the ages. —.

My brother, life is all great. Life is great because it is the aggregation of littles. As the chalk cliffs that rear themselves hundreds of feet above the crawling sea beneath, are all made up of the minute skeletons of microscopic animalculæ; so life, mighty and awful as having eternal consequences, life that towers beetling over the sea of eternity, is made up of these minute incidents, of these trifling duties, of these small tasks; and if thou art not "faithful in that which is least," thou art unfaithful in the whole.