But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power?

If it is natural for lightning to strike the earth, why doesn’t it strike each and every one of us? Why does it not blind us all?

But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.

His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning.

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.

The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.

But the test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.

When the lightning strikes one of us, it strikes both

When I see lightning — you know it always brings me down
'Cause it's free and I see that it's me
Who's lost and never found.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

What! Think you that my flashes show me Only in lightnings to excel? Believe me, friends, you do not know me, For I can thunder quite as well.

But where this passionate self will go, </br> God knows, </br> Who knows whence the lightning comes, and </br> whither it goes.

The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things in nature, will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry, that slights such observation, must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights.