Inspiration must find answering inspiration.
None can teach admirably if not loving his task.
Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds.
The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.
Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.
While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
A birthday is a good time to begin a new; throwing away the old habits, as you would old clothes, and never putting them again.
Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.
Your real influence is measured by your treatment of yourself.
Yet the deepest truths are best read between the lines, and, for the most part, refuse to be written.
Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.
A check on itself, evil subserves the economies of good, as it were a condiment to give relish to good.
Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.
The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.
Every dogma embodies some shade of truth to give it seeming currency.
Without a mythology, faith is impersonal and heartless.
A state, a community, caring first for all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as for their temporal well-being, has organized the primitive Eden.