Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
The little troubles and worries of life may be as stumbling blocks in our way, or we may make them stepping-stones to a nobler character and to Heaven. Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
Love is the river of life in the world.
A man’s ledger does not tell what he is, or what he is worth. Count what is in man, not what is on him, if you would know what he is worth-whether rich or poor.
The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October than May. Every green thin loves to die in bright colors.
The human soul is God’s treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
When God thought of mother, He must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly – so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception.
There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.