Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence -- the other from pride or fear.

If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.

Love -- that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home -- sometimes burns at unholy altars.

Observation -- activity of both eyes and ears.

Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.

Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.

If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.

In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.

We put things in order -- God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west, it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is.

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.

We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man.

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.

The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield.

Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.

The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.

Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.