Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Teaching isn’t one-tenth as effective as training.
Deeds survive the doers.
Knowledge is a mimic creation.
As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.
Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.
When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.
We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.